Falon Stutzman: The End of a Long Line

Falon Stutzman's paintings immerse us in the late eighteenth century as a kind of fever dream wherein lush fabrics and pageantry abound. Drawing on the pastel silks and lyrical brushwork of Gainsborough and the rococo tradition, Stutzman stages a dysfunctional family portrait: brothers brawling on lawns, mothers upended in their corsets, husbands choking on roast beef. Excess is everywhere, and so is a sense of precariousness it masks.

For all their opulence, these figures are one open window away from ruin, subject to charlatans, illness, and indignity. In the diptych Daughter Being Cured of Heartbreak, a young woman lies collapsed across her pillows, a bowl of blood-red liquid at her bedside indicating both a wound and a treatment. What makes the work so compelling is the refusal to moralize: Stutzman observes the absurdity of these lives, particularly the staggering constraints placed on women amid such theatrical abundance, with bemused recognition. These are comedy-of-errors paintings, alive to the universality of certain humiliations and desires.

Stutzman's figures have the same soft, blurred faces in every canvas: wide-open eyes, creased foreheads, and rosy cheeks. They're archetypes, bringing the paintings into the realm of fable. To that end, small props serve as symbols throughout the show — a caged bird, a dog eviscerating a cake, a fox in pursuit of its hunter — each one a signal that something has already gone wrong or is about to.

The exhibition’s palette emphasizes the sensibility of the period: candy pinks, buttery yellows, colors that feel simultaneously indulgent and a little queasy. The sumptuous styles, too, borrow from Gainsborough, Fragonard, and Boucher. But Stutzman's compositions -- bodies tumbling out of the frame, limbs caught mid-motion -- sometimes bring us closer into these figures' tribulations than we otherwise might expect.

This exhibition emerged from a question Stutzman kept posing to herself: paintings from this period tend to share a similar atmospheric and emotional register, so what if certain contemporary styles and moods could better capture the absurd, even depraved elements of actually living through it? For Stutzman, the late- eighteenth century functions as a costume for very contemporary anxieties: appearances, propriety, and the exhausting performance of maintaining both.

Falon Stutzman (b. 1984, Silver Spring, MD; lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska) earned a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design. She has previously had solo exhibitions with Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles, Kishka Gallery, Vermont and The Door, Brooklyn, and was included in a group exhibition at Megan Mulrooney. Her work was featured in the 2024 edition of New American Paintings.