And My Olympia

Press Release

JJ MURPHY GALLERY is excited to present Vincent Ciniglio’s solo exhibition of recent paintings, “And My Olympia,” opening Wednesday, January 15, 2025, from 6–8 PM. The show runs from January 16 through February 15. Gallery hours: Thursday–Saturday, 12–6 PM. The show, the gallery’s ninth, is Ciniglio’s first solo exhibition in NYC in 25 years.

As a child growing up in Jersey City, Vincent Ciniglio became fascinated by movies. After a stint in the military, he visited museums and churches in Italy, France, and the Netherlands, including a week at the Louvre, which affected him profoundly. He was teaching history at area colleges when he came upon the New York Studio School on Eighth Street. A desire to take a summer course in basic drawing led to his spending the next three years there. It was Philip Guston, no less, who suggested that Ciniglio pursue a graduate degree in painting at Columbia University.

Ciniglio’s work has changed in style and technique over the years. Early in his career he experimented with abstraction before returning to figuration. He worked in oil but changed to acrylic several years ago in order to work faster. For the artist, it is important to be able to capture whatever inspires him quickly before the creative spark dissipates. In “New Haircuts” (2024), for instance, Ciniglio happened to notice three young men on the street who had all gotten new haircuts. The resulting painting is less concerned with the details of the young men’s haircuts than in capturing the feeling he had when he first encountered them. Ciniglio remains fascinated by “the way images are recalled or emerge in the process of working.”

The artist gets his ideas from a variety of sources. Some works are portraits. These include Sacco and Vanzetti, a woman on the beach with a large blue hat, or a woman in an orange dress. The subject matter can be historic places like Versailles or references to art history, in the case of Édouard Manet’s "Olympia” (1863). Ciniglio likes to point out the fact that he doesn’t paint directly from observation or photographs but mainly from his own memories and recollections. Although the works deal with specific, even mundane subjects, they become filtered through his rich imagination. As a result of the artist’s use of loose, gestural brushstrokes, Ciniglio's colorful paintings create a fascinating interplay between abstraction and what he depicts.

Based on Manet’s masterpiece, Ciniglio’s small 11 x 14" painting “And My Olympia” (2023) ignores the nuanced details of the original that caused controversy, such as the racial and sexual politics of its representation. Instead of an erotic reclining nude, Ciniglio’s Olympia lies in a flat space, like a discarded rag doll that's been painted from an overhead perspective. The artist’s childlike rendition somehow deflates the grandiosity of the original through a simple rendering and a lively sense of humor that characterizes his work.

Vincent Ciniglio has exhibited paintings in solo shows at John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY, and Elizabeth Harris Gallery, NYC. His work has been shown in group exhibitions, including “Painting and Sculpture Today” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art; “12 Artists” at the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY; and most recently, “Artful Partners” at the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery at John Jay College, NYC. Ciniglio attended the New York Studio School for three years, from 1969 to 1972, and received an MFA in Painting from Columbia University. He lives and works in New York City.