Connor Marie Stankard’s work occupies a space where pleasure and unease coalesce, presenting figures that feel both familiar and alien. The paintings explore the fragility of beauty under the inevitability of decay through gestures that blur the line between attraction and repulsion. Stankard’s subjects exist in a state of flux—emerging, dissolving, and mutating within the stillness of painting.

At the core of Stankard’s practice is a tension between vitality and decay, a theme rooted in the tradition of vanitas painting. Historically, vanitas conveyed pious reflections on the transience of life and the fleeting nature of pleasure. While Stankard’s work acknowledges this tradition, it subverts moralizing in favor of eros and indulgence. Figures and objects are rendered in fluid, dripping paint that evokes bodily fluids such as blood, semen, and tears, which are markers of life and decay simultaneously. This dynamic is particularly evident in works created during the artist’s residency at Dragon Hill on the Cote d’Azur in 2024, in which angels, pregnant women, and overripe apples become potent symbols of cyclical death and rebirth.

Stankard’s palette, dominated by synthetic and cosmetic hues, heightens the unsettling quality of her figures. These colors suggest a polished facade concealing underlying fractures, underscoring the play between allure and alienation. Her subjects are not traditional portraits but studies in unraveling, forms that tease coherence only to slip into controlled chaos. Her approach recalls the emotional distortion of Francis Bacon, the interrogation of femininity in Marlene Dumas, and the corporeal grotesquerie of Hans Bellmer.

The fluidity of paint itself serves as a metaphor for the body—its pleasures, mess, and inevitable decomposition. The figures are both constructed and undone, repeated to the point of mutation, as if perfection has become a trap. In this way, the work invites viewers to search for traces of humanity amid artifice, only to find fragments or shells left behind.

Connor Marie Stankard (b. 1992, Princeton, New Jersey) lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from Pace University in 2015 and her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2021. Recent solo exhibitions include Love Apple, Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); Ava, Chloe, Blair, Nicole, Lubov, New York (2022); and Cloaca Palace, The Anderson, Richmond, Virginia (2021).