INFORMATION

Mariposa is pleased to present Dream Lover, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Max Xeno Karnig. The exhibition takes its title from the 1993 erotic thriller by Nicholas Kazan starring Mädchen Amick and James Spader. While only one work directly sources its imagery from the film, it provides a thematic backdrop for Karnig's exploration of desire, fantasy, and projection across a new suite of paintings.

Karnig’s practice begins with the premise that painting is a simple game of trompe l’oeil. Painted shapes trick the eye to present as something that they are not, always with a subtle wink that acknowledges the viewer’s knowing participation in the game. Along these lines, to look at a painting or to make a painting is to love. It is an act of embracing something for all its details and charm. It involves a conscious suspension of reality. 

Karnig finds inspiration for his subject matter in a wide range of sources: editorial and fashion photography, film stills, historical paintings, and scenes from his personal life. This exhibition focuses on a suite of new small-scale portraits and nudes of female subjects. Mostly painted on copper panels, the works appear classical in their approach and traditional in their compositions. However, further contemplation reveals an emphatic distortion and exaggeration of the subjects’ features. The painted images begin to slide from mimesis into an uncanny abstraction. 

The artist has found that portraiture and still life painting can be fertile ground for this type of idealization, historical posturing, and mythmaking. His paintings are sites of exploration for formal games and inventions that reveal both broad cultural tastes and intimate personal desires. In his work, Karnig mines compositions and techniques ranging from Italian Renaissance painting and French neoclassical painting to Modernism and contemporary art, to discover a contemporary image of desire. A portrait, a flower in bloom, or a nude perched within the painting seemingly capture a single instant, yet the process of painting each draws on many different moments. Karnig intends for his inspiration to feel muddled, and for the viewer to be slightly disoriented. His approach conjures Walter Benjamin’s words in The Origin of the German Tragic Drama: “Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material in the process of its genesis.”

The exhibition will be on view from November 4–December 19, 2026, at Mariposa, 150 W 28th Street, Suite 1101.