A. Lars Deike

Lars Deike, the pride art founder, was born in 1963 as the son of a publishing family in Constance on Lake Constance, completed his training as a publishing clerk there and, after moving to Berlin, worked as an editor at a large Berlin newspaper.

His love of photography had accompanied him for a long time and so he decided to study photography in Los Angeles.

After returning to Germany in 2001, Lars Deike opened his photo studio in Munich. There, the focus was on the male body in the interplay of light and shadow his camera.

In the course of his work as a freelance photographer, Lars Deike specialized in the field of nude and fetish photography. His photographs adorned calendars, catalogs and Cover photos of numerous gay magazines. Numerous exhibitions in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg have made him a fixture in the field of erotic male photography in Germany.

In 2011 Lars Deike, influenced by his uncle - also a painter - discovered
the love of painting. Thematically, he ties in with his past as a photographer and banishes the male body in erotic play, usually larger than life on canvas.

Lars Deike showed a selection of his work for the first time at Folsom Europe 2011.

At Europe's largest fetish event, he concentrates thematically in the selection of his Pictures on the subject of fetish.

Lars Deike wants to deliberately provoke. With his exhibition, the artist wants to cover the entire spectrum of varieties of male gay sexuality - Leather, rubber, skins, sports, or even a complete "snax scene" can be found in his find pictures.

It is important to him that his pictures provoke, but in an aesthetic way
subject to entitlement and not objectionable.

In addition to the topic of fetish, there is also the male body - young or old in the center of the exhibition. In 2018, Lars Deike invited other artists to exhibit with him in an old factory building for the first time in his studio at Ostkreuz in Berlin. Under the name PRIDE Art, they showed erotic queer art on the factory premises, including in a Trabi workshop. In 2022, Lars Deike founded the non-profit association prideART e. V. and moved with the association to the former women's prison The Knast in Lichterfelde. Today, queer artists show their work on 3 floors in 48 rooms. prideART already has over 50 members. Lars Deike, the founder of prideART, now has his studio on the top floor of the artist house. Films such as Babylon Berlin have already been shot in the historic building. Lars Deike can be found on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok under Lars Deike or www.deike.de