“Terence Stamp” by Karen Heagle

Before he was killed by a hustler in 1975, queer Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini was a pioneer of 1960s and ’70s avant-garde cinema with films like Decameron, Teorema and 1975′s Sálo, in which sadistic Aristocrats graphically degrade and abuse a group of young charges.

Now a new art exhibit at New York’s Allegra LaViola Gallery pays tribute to the rebel filmmaker: “I Killed My Father, I Ate Human Flesh, I Quiver With Joy: An Obsession with Pier Paolo Pasolini” includes artwork by contemporary artists like Breyer P-Orridge, Walt Cassidy, Vaginal Davis, Jeremy Kost, Aaron Krach,  Paolo Di Paolo, Ramon Vega and Jordan Wolfson, as well as Pasolini himself.

Pasolini is a mercurial, even arcane influence on the 37 artists whose work is assembled here—sculptors, photographers, video and multimedia artists, romantics and transgressives, advocacy artists and ironists. The tributes are in some cases straightforward — painted portraits of Pasolini subjects, collage and video sourced from his own work — and in other cases more oblique — sculptures addressing the subject of restraint, watery sketches in which figures dissolve into gothic ethereality.

“I Killed My Father, I Ate Human Flesh, I Quiver With Joy” runs through March 24 at LaViola Gallery.