Biography

Cynthia Talmadge 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. While Talmadge’s primary medium is painting, and 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.