
Kyle Coniglio
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.