The Swimmer

JUNE 6-AUGUST 9, 2024

Curated by Jonathan Rider

Click here for the checklist and press release. 
Click here for the expanded checklist.

The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to present The Swimmer, an expansive group exhibition inspired by John Cheever’s 1964 short story of the same name. Artists include Henni Alftan, Harold Ancart, Leonard Baby, Conrad Bakker, Burt Barr, Dike Blair, Martin Boyce, Katherine Bradford, Vija Celmins, Zoe Crosher, Nancy Diamond, Elmgreen & Dragset, Tony Feher, Elizabeth Glaessner, Robert Gober, Wayne Gonzales, Jim Hodges, Reggie Burrows Hodges, Roni Horn, Ludovic Nkoth, Amy Park, Jack Pierson, Alessandro Raho, Calida Rawles, Ed Ruscha, Melanie Schiff, Cindy Sherman, Cynthia Talmadge, Deanna Templeton, Paul Thek, and Stephen Truax.

Published in The New Yorker in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, John Cheever’s The Swimmer is emblematic of mid-century America’s changing perception of its own relationship to class, idealism, and failure, evergreen issues as relevant today as sixty years ago. Cheever’s protagonist, Neddy Merrill—who “might have been compared to a summer’s day”—embarks on the novel adventure to swim home by way of his affluent neighbor’s swimming pools. What begins as a carefree midsummer Sunday devolves into something altogether different and nefarious; Neddy’s life and his grip on reality disappear, pool by pool, the closer he comes to finishing his journey and returning home… whether that’s the same day or perhaps many years later.

FLAG’s exhibition similarly confuses time and unfolds through a series of disappearances in bodies of water—in pools, lakes, and oceans—through serial works that concern loss and losing oneself. Navigating themes inherent in The Swimmer and Cheever’s broader oeuvre, including alcoholism, grandiosity, loss of innocence, selective memory, privilege, sexuality, etc., the exhibition trains an eye to the crumbling of an American dream, set against the glittering backdrop of a string of swimming pools. The ninth floor of the exhibition closely aligns itself with Cheever’s narrative and features a variety of painting, photography, and sculpture in which the body is suggested, but not depicted, positioning the viewer as the “swimmer” in space.  The exhibition’s tenth floor focuses almost exclusively on the figure—the body in water—and explores night swimming, locating the pool as an intimate, self-contained site for mystery and experimentation.

About:

Jonathan Rider is an artist, writer, and director of The FLAG Art Foundation, where he has worked since 2014. Rider has organized solo presentations by artists Tarek Atoui, Ashley Bickerton, Cynthia Daignault, Nicole Eisenman, Elmgreen & Dragset, Sam Gilliam, among others, and thematic group exhibitions, including Friends & Lovers (2024), In Search of the Miraculous (2022), and I will wear you in my heart of heart (2021), Dime-Store Alchemy (2018), and The Times (2017). His writing has appeared in Art in America.

FLAG would like to acknowledge the participating artists, artist estates, galleries, and private lenders for their generous loans of artworks to this exhibition.

#TheSwimmer

Press:

“[…] The denial and doom that flooded the summer of 2024 couldn’t have been better timed for The Swimmer, a group exhibition at The FLAG Art Foundation that closed this past August. Curated by the institution’s director, Jonathan Rider, the show pulled together seventy-two works by thirty-one artists in a variety of media that could almost be read like an advent calendar for [John] Cheever’s story. Some works recalled the text’s sunny, gin-soaked oblivion with a splash of chlorine. The first floor of the gallery focused more on the tale’s mise-en-scène, imbuing placid views of empty pools by artists such as Dike Blair, Amy Park, Alessandro Raho, Ed Ruscha, and Cynthia Talmadge with a humid sense of privilege and loneliness. Nearby, what appeared to be an abstract undulating turquoise sculpture by Martin Boyce, Forgotten Seas, 2010, was actually an arrangement of rusting steel public-pool benches—an assemblage that literally upended any trace of summer nostalgia.”

—David Colman, ARTFORUM

‘[…]The strivings of [Paul] Thek, [Katherine] Bradford and others—artworks that deal with escape—get quite literally swallowed up by the show’s main draw: a work by Tony Feher. A ready-made minimalist who worked in trash, Feher died in 2016 and reinstallations of his work have been rare since. FLAG’s floor-to-ceiling window has been coated in the intricate tessellations of blue painter’s tape (10 rolls’ worth) that he designed in 2015. They fragment and ripple out to the margins, soaking you—and the nearby artworks—in an invigorating glow of cobalt. You feel like a spider on a quivering surface. Or a broken windshield. The thrall of “The Swimmer” is its subtle descent into mania. Mounting social cues from neighbors suggest something has gone terribly wrong in our hero’s recent past, but what? Where, come to think of it, is his wife? A wobbly timeline—autumn leaves, sudden cold—deepen the sense of Neddy losing his grasp—and force us to seek breadcrumbs of clarity.”

—Walker Mimms, The New York Times

“For this year’s summer show, FLAG takes inspiration from an ominous poolside classic. “The Swimmer” by John Cheever is a dark suburban fairytale about a man who attempts to pool-hop his way home from a party, only to slowly and tragically lose his way… When the show fires on all cylinders it manages to channel a kind of creepy mid-century gothic that Lana Del Rey would envy. Scenes of boozy summer leisure slosh over into unsettling moments that reek of liquor and death.”

—Harry Tafoya, Paper

“The Swimmer […] with its depictions of languid bathers and bodies of water in inviting shades of blue. John Cheever’s 1964 short story of the same name, which inspired the show, opens on a similar note of levity: A debonair suburbanite, buzzing with sunshine and gin, has decided to commute across town by swimming in every backyard pool along the way. “The day was lovely, and that he lived in a world so generously supplied with water seemed like a clemency, a beneficence,” Cheever writes. But things prove more complicated, both in the story and on the gallery walls.”

—Laura Regensdorf, T: The New York Times Style Magazine —David Hiroshi Jager, The New York Sun

“The Swimmer feels, for me, relevant and urgent today, around sixty years after it was written. Life not living up to expectations will never not feel relevant. What it means to try to connect with others will never not feel relevant. What it means for dreams or expectations to disappoint (yourself and others) will never not feel relevant. The Swimmer is a deceptively simple narrative that touches on alcoholism, class, idealism, failure, grandiosity, loss of innocence, memory, sexuality, etc., evergreen issues that many of the artists in the exhibition are addressing, directly or otherwise, in their work.”

—Jonathan Rider, designboom

“Curated by Jon Rider, the exhibition features works by powerhouse artists such as Amy Park, Cindy Sherman, Elmgreen & Dragset, and Jack Pierson with a debut of Katherine Bradford’s latest body of work, eleven paintings created specifically for the exhibition.”

—Stefanie Li, Galerie