Break up Fountain pairs work by Samantha Nye and monoprints and frescoes by Todd Stong within the first joint exhibition of their work. The Philadelphia-based artists share a friendship and wealthy dialogue that’s strongly influenced by artwork historical past, citing narratives and visible sources from the Baroque interval, nineteenth- and twentieth-century artwork, and pop and camp tradition of their work. Each artists foreground the centrality of queer actors in acquainted tales of artwork, pleasure, and historical past.
Nye presents three new oil work depicting ladies in lavish states of need and repose. Tailored from way of life photographer Slim Aarons’s work from the Nineteen Forties to Nineties—during which magnificence and affluence seem accessible to solely a choose few—Nye coyly reimagines the privileged areas of Aarons’s images populated with older feminine and nonbinary figures. In her 2022 exhibition with the gallery, Enticing Folks Doing Enticing Issues in Enticing Locations, the compositions of Nye’s work have been action-packed and overflowing with revelers. Right here, solitary or paired figures enact languid and dreamy poses, set in intimate inside areas replete with a baroque extra of patterns, materials, fruits, and fauna.
Stong presents work from a collection of monotypes begun throughout his graduate research in Rome that reinterpret the lifetime of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), the German artwork historian and archaeologist who devoted himself to the examine of historic Greek and Roman statues and spearheaded the Classical Revival. Over the previous three years, Stong has imagined a fictional historical past that’s encyclopedic, private, and epic in scale, exploring particulars of Winckelmann’s biography as a homosexual man in eighteenth-century Germany and, later in life, in Rome. He depicts male figures at work and at play, surrounded by classical sculptures, lush gardens, and in the newest prints, as tangles of angels and males that ascend and descend amid cloudscapes. In a brand new physique of small-scale frescoes, he additional develops imagery of celestial peril and rapture, whereas hearkening again to the grand allegorical murals of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque painters that each Winckelmann and Stong encountered whereas dwelling and finding out within the Everlasting Metropolis, two and a half centuries aside.
The title of the exhibition, Break up Fountain, refers to a printmaking course of used to create a easy gradient between a number of colours by operating a brayer over the separate ink colours repetitively—a way that’s deftly employed by Stong all through his work on this present. The title additionally playfully suggests colourful and erotic themes that seem in each artists’ work—celebrating ecstatic moments of bodily company, freedom, and pleasure.
