Art

Anthony Iacono builds his distinctive collages by meticulously assembling hand-painted and cut fragments of paper. Seemingly masquerading as paintings due to their bold palette and slick, flattened surface, these collages merge the figurative with the still-life to evoke strange scenes. In Iacono’s works bodies often appear alongside quotidian objects such as fruit, plants, umbrellas, phones and mirrors. Iacono’s collages riff on themes of queer culture, fetish, and their relationship to the mundane nuances of everyday life. Against dark, cool backgrounds, Iacono crops clothed and semi-nude figured into torsos, backsides, busts, and feet. Through his use of high-contrast gradients to define forms, Iacono imagines a hard light illuminating these nighttime activities. We are given glimpses of a larger narrative, but the full story is never fully revealed. Anthony Iacono was born in 1987 in Nyack, New York. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013 and was a resident artist at LMCC Workspace in 2018. Iacono has had solo exhibitions at Marinaro gallery in 2018/2019, P.P.O.W. Gallery in 2015 and 2018 and has been included in group shows at Jack Hanley Gallery, 106 Green, and Rockaway Topless. His work has been featured in New York Magazine, The Village Voice, and New American Paintings. In 2017 he was a recipient of the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship Award. He was a resident at the Museum of Arts and Design's studio residency program in Spring 2019.