The Last Human Kissat Sainsbury Centre

Exploring how the kiss has shaped human ideas of love, intimacy, devotion, betrayal and belonging.

The Last Human Kiss explores how the kiss has shaped human ideas of love, intimacy, devotion, betrayal and belonging for millennia.

Fleeting though it is, the kiss remains one of humanity’s most powerful forms of expression: a symbol through which societies have imagined intimacy, negotiated power and given form to love itself. This exhibition traces how artists have returned to the kiss as a way of thinking about human connection and condition.

The exhibition unfolds across five chapters: ‘The First Kiss’ lingers in the fragile space where attraction becomes attachment and strangers become companions; ‘The Divine Kiss’ explores the Renaissance fascination with love’s power to disrupt; in ‘The Social Kiss’ intimacy reflects political or collective dynamics; ‘The Romantic Kiss’ explores desire’s euphoric charge, while ‘The Trickster Kiss’ brings us to the present, where kissing takes on mediated, digital, and post-human forms, at once everywhere and strangely absent.

Spanning painting, sculpture, photography and film, the exhibition features work by Auguste Rodin, Wolfgang Tillmans, Sally Mann, William Blake, Anthony van Dyck, and Tracey Emin.

The Last Human Kiss is curated John Kenneth Paranada, formerly Curator of Art and Climate Change at the Sainsbury Centre, and forms part of the exhibition season asking How Do We Find Love?