Pageantry

Lomex is proud to present Pageantry, Joseph Geagan’s second show with the gallery. Geagan’s playful paintings represent comic scenes that foreground the social world around him and its extended imaginary history. A self-taught artist, Geagan’s work represents his friends, artists, iconic pop figures, and different imaginary personalities in various states of socializing and carousing. Painting in an anachronistic style more akin to social portraiture characteristic of the 1930s, Geagan’s work articulates a kind of camp history. Depicting his collaborators alongside figures like Amanda Lepore and Isabella Blow, Geagan draws from a divergent network of social histories of different arts communities. He looks to narrative sources as varied as oral histories of the “Club Kids” of 90s New York, depictions of queer communities of the East Village, and images of the “café society” of late 19th century Paris. The works on view draw influence from paintings by Brueghel, Goya, Norman Rockwell, and Manet.