Tony Cox “Shadow Bathing”

Marlborough Contemporary

[Imge: Tony Cox "flip fucking" (2019) embroidery, needle and thread, acrylic paint, leather, pony skin, twisted lip cord, 48 x 36 in.]

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For his exhibition Shadow Bathing, multidisciplinary artist Tony Cox will present a series of all-new, large-scale, hand-embroidered abstractions on acrylic-coated canvas. Combining gender and sexual politics with the post-minimal concerns of material and process, these works occupy a space between painting and sculpture. Though, as a self-taught artist who sharply eschews formal pigeon-holing, Cox works intuitively and irreverently and his process moves from the inside out rather than moving from enveloping defining categories, back in.

Starting with the back of a canvas, or what he calls the “subconscious B-side,” Cox begins the “life of a line”—a base-drawing that traces a series of lines and gestures that evolve to suggest topographies of body and place. Eventually, the canvas is laid across two sawhorses and the artist works from below, painstakingly puncturing the underside with sewing needles, sometimes hundreds of thousands of times until a legible pattern reveals itself on the face. Cox considers the life of a line a transcendent cycle indexed with pain and progress—literal puncture wounds and ultimately the manifestation of a formal construct.