curatorial
Woman on a Balcony
Sarah Avolio, Rowan Howe, Florence Reekie
April 11 – May 3, 2025 | Sargent’s Daughters, New York
Press Release by Christine Nyce
Woman on a Balcony features new works by three emerging figurative painters, Sarah Avolio, Rowan Howe, and Florence Reekie, all of whom create enigmatic scenes of domestic life through unconventional compositions. The exhibition takes its title from a fragment of a Roman fresco in the collection of the Getty Villa, featuring a lone woman standing on a balcony. The rest of the fresco has been lost to history, but this piece remains, preserving the woman but not her original context. Like the jagged edges of this fragment, the borders of a canvas can isolate an image from its larger context, a tactic employed by all three artists on view.
Sarah Avolio’s work recalls the finesse of traditional oil painting, yet her subjects become estranged and abstracted by her dramatically cropped compositions. The young women in Rowan Howe’s highly detailed works are shown up close or at unconventional angles, creating ambiguous scenes of intimacy and alienation. The viewer, immersed in these private moments, can only guess at the narrative surrounding them. Florence Reekie paints on both cotton supports and on Moiré silk, allowing the texture of the fabric to ground the painted composition. Her works evoke the detritus of femininity and center the details of daily life.
Summer Camp
AES+F, Will Cotton, Scott Csoke, Zackary Drucker, Cielo Félix-Hernández, Emily Furr, Joel Gaitan, Nash Glynn, Clarity Haynes, Narcissister, Jo Nigoghossian, mujero, Juan Arango Palacios, Carlos Rosales-Silva, Alake Shilling, Stanley Stellar, Rachel Youn, Zaldy, Sarah Zapata
June 5 – July 19, 2024 | Sargent’s Daughters, New York
Press Release by Christine Nyce
Camp is an over-the-top, aesthetic sensibility that transforms morality, solemnity, and good taste into vulgarity, artificiality, and extravagance, animated by a sly sense of humor.
For the inaugural exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters new Tribeca location, we are thrilled to invite you to Summer Camp, an exuberant celebration of Camp aesthetics, curated by Allegra LaViola, Christine Nyce and Sofia Love.
This expansive, intergenerational exhibition turns a side-eye towards the trope of the “summer group show,” eschewing its predictability and self-seriousness, and instead inviting twenty artists to have a good time and capture the frenetic, utopian energy of the summer.
The artists included in Summer Camp all reflect the concept of Camp in their work, whether via the subversion of art-historical tropes, maximalist refutations of good taste, or theatrical aesthetics. They also reflect Susan Sontag’s statement that “Camp taste is a kind of love, a love for human nature.”
Sontag also acknowledges that Camp can be a verb, i.e. “to Camp.” So, it is not incorrect to say that Sargent’s Daughters is “going Camping.” Invite your friends.
