Auxier Kline is pleased to present Limbs, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by the artist Gabe Cortese.

Cortese is a Painter and Draftsman, interested in intersectional identities, queer mythologies, and the history of the male body in art. As a Queer Latino man, Cortese explores and challenges what it means to exist with the pressures, expectations, and roles projected onto him throughout his life. Cortese pulls inspiration from both the cannon of religious painting across art history, subverting these familiar religious motifs in order to create a discord between spirituality and sexuality, and from his childhood experience growing up near Disney World in Orlando, applying this illustrative language to navigate his own mysterious stories in his imaginative world.

Limbs presents the most current body of work created by Cortese to date. The works explore the beginnings of a new visual narrative, featuring the familiar protagonist that has become a hallmark of the artist's work, a figure that reflects attributes of Cortese’s long time partner, who he uses as an avatar to narrate his own experiences. The newest chapter of the mythology featuring the artist’s protagonist follows his psychosexual need to fit himself within the confinements dictated by nature, in the form of a tree that rivals him in size and stature.  The figure is depicted across six paintings and seven works on paper in his desperate endeavors to physically meld the tree’s limbs with his own, to no avail.  Cortese renders his figure across the full range of human emotion as he tries to seduce, wrestle with, dominate, or be dominated by the tree who remains constantly indifferent to his failed overtures, illustrating an allegory of unrequited love.

Gabe Cortese (b. 1994, Key West, Florida) received his BFA in 2017 and his MFA in 2021 from the University of Central Florida. Recent solo exhibitions include Nothing Good Happens at Night, M+ B Los Angeles, CA, Flirting with a Shadow at The Cabin LA in Los Angeles, CA. Recent group exhibitions include Auxier Kline, IRL, A Species of Wring, and Summer Stage, Auxier Kline, New York, NY; Fluid Suns and Vitamin C, G/art/en Gallery, Italy; Lost in a Spectacle, Woaw Gallery, China; and Slow Songs, Quappi Projects, Louisville, KY. Gabe Cortese lives and works in Rhode Island.