Catharine Clark Gallery presents “Cruel Summer,” a special online exhibition of a major painting and new drawings by New York-based artist Kyle Coniglio.
“Hot summer streets and the pavements are burning, I sit around
Trying to smile, but the air is so heavy and dry”
—Excerpt from “Cruel Summer” by Bananarama, 1983
Catharine Clark Gallery presents “Cruel Summer,” a special online exhibition of a major painting and new drawings by New York-based artist Kyle Coniglio. 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.
Artist Biography
Kyle Coniglio (b. 1988, Wayne, NJ) received his MFA in painting from Yale University and a BFA from Montclair State University. He has been a fellow of the Queer Art Mentorship program in New York and an affiliated fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Coniglio’s work was featured in New American Paintings (#158) and he was interviewed on the acclaimed podcast “Talk Art,” co-hosted by Russell Tovey and Robert Diament. He has had solo exhibitions at Richard Heller Gallery, Louis Buhl Gallery, and Taymour Grahane Projects, and his work has been included in group exhibitions at Jane Lombard Gallery, Library Street Collective, Nazarian / Curio, and Victoria Miro. Coniglio lives and works in Hudson Valley, NY.
