Salon 94 welcomes Galerie Derouillon this fall for a space swap between Paris and NYC—launching Alex Foxton’s first U.S. solo show in the gallery’s historic New York headquarters.
In his first solo show in New York, Alex Foxton explores masculinity in a moment when it is both overstated and reduced to its most uniformed and rigid codes. The exhibition’s title is drawn from the 17th- century novel Don Quixote. The author, Miguel de Cervantes, referred to his main character as “Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance.” This nickname as later adopted by the 20th-century Spanish matador Manolete—a recurring figure in Foxton’s work who named himself in homage to the literary hero. The three utterances of the epithet present the path by which storytelling and persona draw us into the space between delusion and principle, flamboyance and tradition, personhood and symbolic gesture.
Born in the UK in 1980, Foxton works from Paris where he has centered his practice on painting the male figure through the shifting languages of authority and cadence—in groups, or individuals pulled from groups—as they make malleable the components of their personhood just below the surface. From portraying Henry VIII with lipstick and glitter (Honi soit qui Mal y pense, 2021) to reimagining the masculine wardrobe in charcoal portraits of his own garments (Hex, 2022), the tensions of fantasy permeate every canvas, questioning the seductive nature of authority itself.
Foxton frequently works from photographs that were once headlines— images that are widely known and, to some degree, the details of which have been long forgotten. This open space gives the void for the artist to paint through historical images with counterpoints of intervention and insight, building up thick layers of paint that give the background a dense, palimpsest-like depth, on which the figures emerge with the immediacy of drawing. Glitter often appears on the canvas, recurring in Foxton’s work as a way of softening the bold masculinity of his figures. This spectral reimagining stems from reality, yet through his restrained palette and graphic precision with colors and line that recall Warhol’s screenprint paintings (of yesteryears’ headlines…), he recontextualizes their meaning. Foxton brings these past events into dialogue with our contemporary—future? —anxieties.
In the Wood Room, two large canvases (all 2025) portray groups of men in military regalia confront viewers with a forceful presence—a palpable sense of physical domination, five men in each work tower over their audience. These men in uniform capture the moment when individuality dissolves into collective identity—revealing the attraction of conformity and authority—and the dread it carries when the individual is extracted and isolated from the group. From the youthful grace of schoolboys running in Etonians (I) and Etonians (II) we foretell the rigid formations of future militarism (two soldiers are pictured, rank and file, in Cadets.) These works embody the uneasy betweenness of allure and menace, domination and desire, adolescence and adulthood.
In the adjacent gallery, group dynamics give way to solitary, subdued figures and cropped portraits. Here, the colors soften and the surfaces appear weathered. Portraits of figures such as Lawrence of Arabia and Roy Cohn emerge as flattened, stylized bodies vibrating with tension— magnetic yet hollow, seductive yet disquieting. With limbs blurring into the background, the figures become uncontained, dissolving like ghosts, with the intoxication of power inevitably eroding into self- destruction.
‘‘Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance’’ is neither parody nor nostalgia. Instead, it stands as an unflinching study of power’s erotic pull, asking what it means to desire the spectacle of authority, when does discipline become militarism and when does tradition become dogma?
