Carl Kostyál is thrilled to present the third solo exhibition of Cynthia Talmadge (b. 1989 in New York, lives and works in New York) with the gallery in collaboration with 56 Henry. Held at Adelsnäs Castle in Sweden, the exhibition opens on the 1st June.
“The Complete Works of R. Wilkes-Hunter, A.K.A Caroline Farr, A.K.A Todd Conrad, A.K.A Diana Douglas, A.K.A Bradley Ross, A.K.A…”, marks the artist’s debut in Sweden. Talmadge had her first exhibition ‘Seven Sisters’ with the gallery in Milan (2021) followed by ‘Winter Break’ (2022) in London.
“For her third solo exhibition with Carl Kostyál—and her first in Sweden—New York-based artist Cynthia Talmadge takes over the grand library of Adelsnäs Castle with an elaborate homage to the elusive pulp novelist known as Caroline Farr. ‘The Complete Works of R. Wilkes-Hunter’ reanimates the tangled pseudonymous legacy of a single, shadowy figure. Under names like Caroline Farr, Todd Conrad, and Diana Douglas, Wilkes-Hunter produced a stream of romance and suspense novels, each with its own slick branding and formulaic charm. Talmadge offers not a biography, but a mise-en-scène: a sand-painted meditation on identity, narrative, and the surfaces we trust too easily.
These paintings are crafted with characteristic precision: each colour isolated by hand and filled with vibrantly pigmented sand, creating crisp shapes and vivid contrasts. The process recalls pointillism, but with depth altered by the medium’s grainy shimmer. Light scatters across millions of tiny particles, veiling each scene in gentle fog. This softened texture lends even the boldest compositions a kind of visual vertigo—like something just out of reach. In ‘Gothic Romance Pairing (Escargot)’, pale yellow cuts across a dreamy blue interior with snails just a little too big for the appetite; in ‘Gothic Romance Pairing (Mai Tai)’, pinks and oranges smoulder beneath a hazy surface, inviting and withholding in the same breath; and in ‘Gothic Romance Pairing (Cured Meats)’, deep red salami coils and mottled pâtés sprawl across tiled surfaces where every element pulses with flesh-like density.
Elsewhere in the castle’s library, faux bookshelves are seamlessly inserted among the real ones, their trompe l’œil titles bearing the names of Wilkes-Hunter’s many aliases. Against a backdrop of stately leather-bound volumes, these uncanny inserts feel like whispered secrets—half-spectres, half-intruders. Alongside the tableau-like sand paintings is a single oil work: a pointillist piece depicting the full set of covers published under the Caroline Farr name. Looser and more gestural than the rest, it offers a moment of relief—less controlled, more alive, fluttering with unresolved emotion.
As in earlier projects, Talmadge builds with layers: of medium, of narrative, of artifice. Her method transforms physical surfaces into psychological spaces. In her 2023 exhibition ‘Goodbye to All This: Alan Smithee Off Broadway’, she invented a singular persona to give life to a pseudonym used by many. Here, she inverts the premise: one man fragmented into dozens of names, each more anonymous through excess. The branding of each alias flattens into a decorative shell, until identity feels emptied of substance. What begins as surface becomes quietly unnerving, catching viewers in a push-pull of desire and distance. You’re not sure if these images are clues, traps, or both.
Set inside Adelsnäs Castle—a structure spanning from the 18th century to early 20th-century National Romantic architecture—Talmadge’s work feels uncannily at ease, as though always meant to unfold there. The castle itself sits suspended in time, much like the pseudonymous novels it now houses.
Talmadge’s exhibitions are known for their theatrical coherence and research- driven depth, and The Complete Works of R. Wilkes-Hunter is no exception. Built from obsessive attention to surface and narrative, it’s a show that seduces slowly. And while it may shimmer with nostalgia and melodrama, what lingers is more elusive—less the stories we inherit than the ones we quietly construct.”
– Anitra Lourie
Cynthia Talmadge, ‘The Complete Works of R. Wilkes-Hunter’, Press Release
Cynthia Talmadge (born in 1989 in New York) 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, 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 parlour or a treatment centre through the conventions of pointillism or midcentury melodramas, she transforms the private inevitability of loss or trauma into something demanding collective examination.