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Joseph “Francois” Kozak

AMERICAN, 1953-2025

Untitled, 2009. Ink, acrylic, and colored pencil on paper. Offered in AFTER DARK on 28 August 2025.

NOTE: The following article is NSFW and includes images of sex and artistic nudity.

Born in Lodi, New Jersey, Joseph Kozak studied at the esteemed Art Students League of New York under Robert Beverly Hale, curator of American painting and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Better known by his preferred artistic persona of “Francois”, Kozak developed a distinctive visual language that blended romanticism, gothic fantasy, vampiric lore, latent Catholic symbolism, and homoeroticism. Kozak populated his tableaus with Native American figures, eerie Victorian children, macabre dancing skeletons, and members of the seventeenth-century European aristocracy. In his more sexually explicit works, saintly figures, angels, and decadent libertines frequently emerge as subjects.

Joseph “Francois” Kozak. Untitled, 1998. Ink, acrylic, and pastel on paper. Offered in AFTER DARK on 28 August 2025.

Kozak’s imagery possesses a distinctly theatrical and visionary quality one that amounts to a visual exorcism. He constructs imaginative worlds that oscillate between historical fantasy, religious iconography, and eroticism. In the artist’s own words, his practice was shaped by a range of spiritual experiences: “my sojourn in the Baroque theatre enabled spirit communications, Swedenborg’s ‘visual speech’ of the [angels], mediumistic experimentations, rediscovery of the beauty of the other times and places… the tears of the castrati and the outcast prophets.” [1]

Joseph “Francois” Kozak. Le Oracle: The Prophet, 1998. Ink, acrylic, and pastel on paper. Offered in AFTER DARK on 6 November 2025. [2]

Working across multiple media, Kozak employed ink, watercolors, graphite, acrylic, colored pencil, charcoal in his work. Kozak regularly exhibited at the Leslie-Lohman Gallery and was included in the 2019 group retrospective Male Gaze: Life, Legend, Legacy which was held in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. Following his death, his work was honored in the posthumous one-man show titled Saints and Sinners at the Outer Hall Gallery in Leighton, Pennsylvania. Kozak's work entered the collections of prominent private collectors, including gothic novelist Anne Rice and musician Marilyn Manson, and is held in the public collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.

Notes

[1] Peter Weiermair, ed., Treasures of Gay Art from the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation. Austria: All Saints Press, 2008, p. 262.

[2] Le Oracle: The Prophet is also illustrated in Treasures of Gay Art from the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation. (Weiermair, p. 160.)