Cynthia Talmadge
Bulletin Board
17-JUL-23 – 17-AUG-23
Further Down the Line is pleased to present its second exhibition, a show by New York based artist Cynthia Talmadge, opening 17th July 2023.
Working primarily in painting, sculpture and drawing, Talmadge’s artworks depict contemporary Americana culture, often focusing on the disparities and confluences between public and private space. Paintings portray buildings such as Frank E. Campbell, New York’s most iconic funeral home, and examine architectural aspects of liberal art colleges and universities left empty over winter break. The settings that her work transport us to – from brutalist and gothic style buildings to the entirely imagined – are emotive and melancholic and amplified by her use of colour and technique. An erudite approach to painting’s art history, seen in the meticulous adoption of Pointillism, or the commitment to bodies of work produced in a reduced palette of swathes of faded colour, assist in suffusing sites and situations with possibilities where existential epiphanies could unfold – places where timelines seem confused and appear to oscillate between past and present.
The exhibition Bulletin Board consists of one single painting illustrating a set of discarded flyers. Presented in the waiting room of a train station and newly produced for the exhibition, the work functions as a response to site and place, yet it also engages with narratives of psychodrama that run central to the artist’s practice. While seeming past due, sun faded and redundant, the content of the painting seeks to break free from its immediate confines, willing to communicate with the present. Emotional states tied up with culture’s incessant outpouring springs to mind, but are these flyers now lost in their pursuit for action? What are they asking from us and to whom might they have been previously requesting? Have we missed the deadline?
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Cynthia Talmadge lives and works in New York. Her past solo presentations include Goodbye to All This: Alan Smithee Off Broadway, Bortolami, New York (2023); Winter Break, Carl Kostyál, London (2022), Franklin Fifth Helena, 56 HENRY, New York (2021); Seven Sisters, Carl Kostyál, Milan (2021); 1076 Madison, 56 HENRY (2019); Four Courtroom Outfits of Anna Delvey, Soft Opening Piccadilly Circus Underground, London (2019); As the World Turns, Halsey McKay Gallery, New York (2018), and Leaves of Absence, 56 HENRY (2017). Talmadge has participated in numerous group shows internationally, and her work has been written about and reviewed in Artforum, the New Yorker, Bomb, the New York Times, Art in America, and many others. Talmadge is represented by 56 HENRY.