Published to accompany Michael Kirkham’s first museum solo exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum in Den Haag, The Story of the Black Glove consists of seven prints and a title page, presented as a limited edition of twenty-five portfolios. They are rendered with Kirkham’s characteristic precision, their intensely observed figures emerging from dense areas of dark shadow.

The recurring protagonist is a black leather glove, detached from any visible owner and apparently endowed with a life of its own. In one drawing it disappears into a woman’s hair; elsewhere it moves across the body in gestures that are simultaneously intimate, intrusive and impersonal. The glove becomes a device through which touch, desire and power can be explored without the reassuring presence of a recognisable lover or partner.

The eroticism is deliberately uneasy. Kirkham’s figures rarely meet the viewer’s gaze, and the anonymous, cropped compositions deny us the context that might explain what is taking place. Bodies become fragments, gestures become clues, and the black glove provides the only consistent narrative thread. The effect is less an erotic fantasy than a sequence of private encounters witnessed without permission.

The final story plate breaks with the human figures and takes us into a bleak urban landscape, where a black glove hangs from a dead or dying tree amid discarded objects and industrial debris. It transforms the glove from an instrument of erotic touch into an isolated emblem, while also connecting the intimate scenes to the desolate urban environments that increasingly entered Kirkham’s work after his move to Berlin.

The portfolio was deliberately conceived around uncomfortable territory, confronting questions of censorship, sexism and social taboo. The anonymity of the title page reinforces the sense of a clandestine narrative.