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① Artwork:
Aspiring Actress (Stanislavski Method)
In this new body of work, the artist has imagined an aspiring actress through a tidy, studious facade—but her interior life is much more complicated. Rendered in Talmadge’s signature pointillist style, the painting depicts the actress’s neat pinboard adorned with pretty ribbons and buttons from all the right acting classes.
“The tabloids might call this a downward spiral—if she were famous enough to catch their attention,” Talmadge says of the new series. “But the potential for her to method act her way through all the worst versions of herself, and a set of unpredictable forces colliding at the intersection of creativity and commerce, leave open another almost infinite set of possibilities, among them true creative fulfillment, swift self-destruction, a completely new phase of self-discovery and interests, or a robust Hollywood career.”
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③ Artist:
Cynthia Talmadge (b. 1989) is a New York–based artist known for paintings, photographs, and installations featuring subject matter from the romantic dark side of contemporary Americana and tabloid culture. Talmadge’s work exhibits a fascination with heightened emotional states, mediated portrayals of those states, and particularly the places where both converge.
Cynthia Talmadge was born in 1989 in New York City, NY. She holds a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI.
While Talmadge’s primary medium is painting, she also designs elaborate interior environments for her work. Her 2018 New York solo show 1076 Madison consisted of eight paintings of the venerable Frank E. Campbell funeral home. Her 2017 debut solo show, Leaves of Absence, consisted of life-sized photographs of meticulously styled sets depicting celebrity rehabs alongside an architectural installation reconstructing a fragment of an imagined room from McLean Hospital.
By viewing a funeral parlor or a treatment center through the conventions of pointillism or midcentury melodramas, she transforms the private inevitability of loss or trauma into something demanding collective examination. Most recently, Talmadge held an exhibition at Bortolami Gallery in New York City titled Goodbye to All This: Alan Smithee Off Broadway.
She has mounted solo exhibitions at Carl Kostyal in Milan, Italy; Soft Opening in London, UK; 56 Henry in New York City, NY; Halsey McKay Gallery in New York City, NY; and elsewhere.
She has participated in group exhibitions at Public Art Fund in New York City, NY; Winter Street Gallery in Edgartown, MA; 56 HENRY in New York City, NY; Deitch in Los Angeles, CA; and Artual Gallery in Beirut, Lebanon.
Her work has been written about in publications such as Art in America Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Cultured Magazine, and Hyperallergic, among others.
In this new body of work, the artist has imagined an aspiring actress through a tidy, studious facade—but her interior life is much more complicated. Rendered in Talmadge’s signature pointillist style, the painting depicts the actress’s neat pinboard adorned with pretty ribbons and buttons from all the right acting classes.More
- Framed: 24.8 x 36.8 in.
