HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

In this exhibition, Hull fuses the ancient with the synthetic—oil on canvas compositions recall the glossy geometry of 1980s Trapper Keepers, overlaid with fractured figures and motifs drawn from Attic vase painting. The ever-present quadrille grid anchors each work, a recurring formal element that conjures minimalism, archival systems, and the regimented space of the museum catalog photograph.

The fragmented imagery in the paintings finds source material in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Dietrich von Bothmer collection, a controversial cache of Greek vase fragments—many of which were donated to the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta, where Hull recently mounted his first institutional solo exhibition. By referencing and recombining these dispersed holdings, Hull gestures toward a symbolic reunification, while interrogating the legacy of antiquities trafficking and the ethics of museological display.

Informed by Carl Jung’s concept of the archetype, Hull’s figures emerge as echoes of the collective unconscious—ancient yet uncannily contemporary. These forms are not merely historical citations, but living symbols: vessels of longing, power, loss, and erotic charge. At the same time, the exhibition engages Jacques Lacan’s theory of the fragmented body, or corps morcelé, a concept that resonates throughout Hull’s fractured compositions. The partial bodies and disrupted narratives suggest not only broken antiquities but also the psychic dismemberments of desire—split between past and present, self and other, fantasy and form.

Hull’s practice is deeply informed by the visual strategies of Jasper Johns, particularly the use of repetition, personal symbology, and a self-contained visual lexicon. In Passions and Ancient Days, museum logos are reframed as if tourist trap stickers, collections of artefacts become sites of desire, and the ancient world flickers back into view through the haze of pop culture memory and academic nostalgia. These new works position the museum not only as a space of preservation, but as a contested arena where private longing, historical narrative, and institutional power converge.

The exhibition also features a 23-page Xerox zine, likewise titled Passions and Ancient Days. Produced in a signed edition of 200, the zine is a lively companion to the show—part visual diary, part poetic experiment. It includes collages, source material snippets, and new, somewhat improvised translations of poems by C.P. Cavafy. Layered with queerdo inspirations and an irreverent archival spirit, the zine offers a lo-fi, deeply personal extension of the exhibition’s themes.

Timothy Hull lives and works in NYC and Upstate NY.