Split Fountain pairs paintings by Samantha Nye and monoprints and frescoes by Todd Stong in the first joint exhibition of their work. The Philadelphia-based artists share a friendship and rich dialogue that is strongly influenced by art history, citing narratives and visual sources from the Baroque period, nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, and pop and camp culture in their work. Both artists foreground the centrality of queer actors in familiar stories of art, pleasure, and history.
Nye presents three new oil paintings depicting women in lavish states of desire and repose. Adapted from lifestyle photographer Slim Aarons’s work from the 1940s to 1990s—in which beauty and affluence appear available to only a select few—Nye coyly reimagines the privileged spaces of Aarons’s photographs populated with older female and nonbinary figures. In her 2022 exhibition with the gallery, Attractive People Doing Attractive Things in Attractive Places, the compositions of Nye’s paintings were action-packed and overflowing with revelers. Here, solitary or paired figures enact languid and dreamy poses, set in intimate interior spaces replete with a baroque excess of patterns, fabrics, fruits, and fauna.
Stong presents work from a series of monotypes begun during his graduate studies in Rome that reinterpret the life of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), the German art historian and archaeologist who dedicated himself to the study of ancient Greek and Roman statues and spearheaded the Classical Revival. Over the past three years, Stong has imagined a fictional history that is encyclopedic, personal, and epic in scale, exploring details of Winckelmann’s biography as a gay 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 most recent prints, as tangles of angels and men that ascend and descend amid cloudscapes. In a new body of small-scale frescoes, he further develops imagery of celestial peril and rapture, while hearkening back to the grand allegorical murals of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque painters that both Winckelmann and Stong encountered while living and studying in the Eternal City, two and a half centuries apart.
The title of the exhibition, Split Fountain, refers to a printmaking process used to create a smooth gradient between multiple colors by running a brayer over the separate ink colors repetitively—a technique that is deftly employed by Stong throughout his work in this show. The title also playfully suggests colorful and erotic themes that appear in both artists’ work—celebrating ecstatic moments of bodily agency, freedom, and joy.