06/26/2026
OPENING TOMORROW !!! Lola Stong-Brett
Sometime Somewhere Someone Is Dancing
Jun 26–Aug 7, 2026
52 White St, New York
James Fuentes is pleased to present Lola Stong-Brett, Sometime Somewhere Someone Is Dancing, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York. Born in London and shaped in recent years by life in the seaside town of Margate, in this new body of work Stong-Brett introduces the ocean as both setting and metaphor: at once a physical landscape of rhythm, depth, and horizon, and a reflection of the emotional currents that shape our everyday lives.
Working at a scale that envelops the body, Stong-Brett’s mark-making is deeply diaristic. Cartoon-like figures emerge from fields of heightened gestural abstraction, recording fluctuating inner states to form an entwined world of direct expression. Across the paintings, figures intertwine, drift apart, cling to one another, or reach beyond each other’s grasp. With great emotional immediacy, the works evoke the complex, shifting choreography of human connection—the experience of holding on and letting go, like witnessing someone you love move beyond you.
Within this symbolic setting, Popeye returns from earlier works alongside Bimbo and a newly introduced female figure. Part childhood nostalgia, part reference to tattoo culture, Popeye first entered Stong-Brett’s paintings as an emblem of raw humanity. The artist recalls initially being drawn to the character’s visual language before discovering the significance of Max Fleischer’s early animations, in which Popeye emerged as one of the first distinctly working-class cartoon characters, depicted within commonplace settings in sharp contrast to the polished fantasy worlds of early Disney. Over time and through repeated use, however, Popeye’s original allegorical charge has loosened and expanded. Evolving into a more fluid emotional architecture, the figure retains its cultural and personal history while remaining open enough to be inhabited by multiple identities and relationships—at times forming a stand-in for the artist herself and the people closest to her.
