Catharine Clark Gallery presents “Cruel Summer,” a
special online exhibition of a major painting and new drawings by New
York-based artist Kyle Coniglio, on view September 30 - October 4, 2025. Mentored by gallery artist Julie Heffernan,
Coniglio was previously featured in the group exhibition “Hotheads
Wall” (2020), which Heffernan curated. Coniglio’s work deeply engages with
both art history and queer camp, with the men in his portraits often
depicted in states of languor and repose. These figures suggest both the
playful lightness of an intimate encounter and the weighty, often heated,
physicality of bodies coming together.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Coniglio’s oil painting
“Sprawl” (2023). The artist explains that the piece “began with the idea
of taking color temperature literally, using it as a visual pun for
extreme heat.” He imagined a plein air painter taking a break from the
oppressive heat, an idea conveyed by a melting ice cream cone on the right and
an abandoned easel on the left. As he worked, Coniglio became fascinated by how
the central rectangular vignette framing the figure began to function as a
“painting within a painting,” a window bridged to the viewer by the painter’s
palette in the bottom left corner. “Playing with the figure-ground
relationship of the central vignette,” he notes, “opened new spaces for
interpretation.”

The presentation also features three new works on paper.
Coniglio’s figures often wear plaster casts, a feature that adds narrative
intrigue and immediacy to his compositions. “I have always been interested in
presenting male figures that are vulnerable rather than heroic,” Coniglio
writes. “Casts are a way to immediately remove the heroic from the figures as
well as instantly giving them a backstory. The wounded figure conjures a sense
of empathy for the viewer.” The casts are also exterior marks of internal
wounds caused by heartbreak. His scenes go beyond the pastoral to suggest
greater psychological depths.