The exhibition include works made between the 1960s to the 1990s by artists including Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas, Eduardo Paolozzi, Tetsumi Kudo, Melle, Hans Eijkelboom, Paul McCarthy & Mike Kelley, Julio Galán, Pope.L, Sophie Calle, and Sylvie Fleury place masculinity within the broader contexts of modernity, postwar consumerism, industrialization, and psychoanalysis.

More recent and new works by artists such as Arlette, EMIRHAKIN, Hamishi Farah, Solomon Garçon, Sven Gex, Jasmine Gregory, Zhana Ivanova, Basir Mahmood, Reba Maybury, Marlie Mul, Sands Murray-Wassink, Paul Pfeiffer, Sara Sadik, P. Staff, Diamond Stingily, SoiL Thornton, Salman Toor, Amanda van Hesteren, Alex Vivian, Bruno Zhu, and Selina Zürrer. They approach masculinity from the perspectives of intimacy, queerness, labor, race, class, fetishization, vulnerability, and popular culture . Across these works, masculinity appears not as a stable or unified identity but as a contested field of representations, gestures, desires, and contradictions. Dominance and aggression coexist with fragility and banality; control with exposure; fantasy with failure.

A number of works have been created especially for the exhibition. Reba Maybury shifts power relations in a work based on Leo Gestel’s Reclining Nude (1910). Jasmine Gregory’s new work from the Investment Piece series underscores how wealth continues to be framed as a white and male privilege. Sven Gex examines how contemporary culture shapes new templates of masculinity by creating “characters” derived from influencers, content creators, celebrities, and actors. Hamishi Farah’s new portrait of  Wolfgang Tillmans reflects on the artist as a prototype of a new, successful masculinity that emerged in the 2000s. SoiL Thornton’s Husband Chair (named after the chairs on which men are invited to wait while their wives shop), an inflatable object designed to block a passageway, is being created site-specifically for the Stedelijk. 

For Beyond the Manosphere, Zhana Ivanova developed a new performance in which she examines how masculinity is suggested and assumed through gestures, postures and movements.