Featured Artist

The Curiosity of Collage – Vincent Inconiglios
Stepping into Vincent Inconiglios’s light-filled stone barn studio on Music Mountain in Falls Village, CT, reveals multimedia collages, gathered objects, and paintings. His curiosity and passion are infectious. He constantly considers his work and maneuvers pieces of recycled paper, as though he is forming thoughts on paper. Collage is the seed of his practice.
“Born in Brooklyn, I went to college and spent some time in Ohio. In 1969, I moved back to New York City to focus on my studio practice. By 1970, I had moved into a large loft on Gansevoort Street in a building with other artists including Robert Downey Sr. who had a studio upstairs. He had just finished the cult film Putney Swope and was working on Pound. Shortly thereafter I took over Robert’s space when he left. I had my first solo show in SoHo in 1972 and participated in Ten Downtown during those years. I currently have about 4,000 sq. ft. spread across two floors allowing me to work on a large scale. I’m one of the last artists to live and work in that immediate area,” shared Inconiglios.
“The area was truly the meatpacking district in the early days, with S&M bars and a lively street life filled with amazing people. Inspired by this unrestrained world, I started the initial collages of the Gansevoort Girls series; the first was called Lauren Bruce. She had Lauren Hutton’s head with 1976 Olympic decathlon gold medal-winner Bruce Jenner’s chest, pulling multiple concepts from these raw streets into a long series of works.”

Gansevoort Girl, Collage on acetate, 30″ x 44″, DSC_9059
What brought you up to this area?
“I had a house in the 70s in Garrison, NY. In 2000, I was looking for a studio north of the city when my wife saw two stone barns for sale online in Falls Village. We discovered Music Mountain. One of the wonderful aspects of my studio is the magnificent view out the studio windows of the sculptural mounds and ever-changing light and shadow patterns.”
He continued, “The property came with gardens, inspiring my wife to explore gardening and landscapes. That exploration led her to a life-changing visit to Great Dixter in the UK, Christopher Lloyd’s Garden, in 2005. We have made many more visits over the years, through which I have formed a close friendship with Fergus Garrett, Great Dixter’s head gardener and CEO. From the beginning I was struck by how he approached the garden like a painter – his process has an integral relationship to collage. This friendship has enhanced how I see our Falls Village property and its surroundings while inspiring several art series.”
Entering Inconiglios’s studio, his collage series are on every surface, small and large pieces each narrating an experience or conversation; he is constantly excited by the next moment. Some series consist of up to 175 pieces, pushing the concept through each image. Small works are projected onto walls, tripping ideas for further large-scale paintings. Shapes, textures, bold lines, thin lines, and spaces appear as a constant navigation of scale and place – reminiscent of lined-up dominos touching and falling in line as this tree of life erupts with new branches.
Inconiglios is fearless of scale, he said he works on big abstract paintings. Some are 9 feet by 18 feet; their origin often comes from his smaller collage works.
The surface plays an essential role throughout his practice, often using layered acetate papers, matte, glossed, and metallic paints that constantly change with light. As you move, the light changes, so the surfaces are never quite the same. When using these different textures, these collaged materials are the paint, and you get added elements. “It’s never the same, I love that. These are relatively new collages with foil, paper, acetate, and cardboard. Collage does many of the same things as painting; I was playing with a different color feeling. These are layers of paper I cut, three or four sheets of paper I cut through and layer together, adding line drawings. Piles of drawings, like sketchbooks, each series catalogs with its own narrative. Grids, tori, lines, color, earth, weather, street life, politics and life’s texture all emerge. The floors are also paintings covered with drips, lines, and other paint marks.”
What motivates you to make this work?
“The joy of discovery is always present whenever I return to the studio. I am immersed in this zone and curious. I like to play with the light and space. When a mail catalog or magazine arrives, I cut it up and work with those images, transforming them into different objects. These are art books, books without words; here are art boxes; all of this work overlaps. I am always making marks and pushing the materiality.”
Life events inform Inconiglios’s practice. Akin to a diary, his work records world events. “While reminiscing about Richard Serra after his death, I made these small ellipses from a coffee sleeve. These are sculptural studies with collages, so I often consider these abstract pieces sculptural.”
Do you find that because you work in two studios, your work is very different in one studio?
“The work is the same in both studios, and I can also work on large paintings in each space. I usually work later in the day, but I’ll come in and look at things in the morning to see how the land lies. Current events play an essential role in my practice, and I often make work in reaction to what is happening in the world. I have made multiple series based on views from the windows in the studios, nightlife, street life, landscapes, series from space exploration, and political events. These threads run through the various themes of the work from the early 1970s to today.”
Where did you teach?
“When I graduated from college, I taught at Western College for Women in Ohio. Later I worked with Richard Anuszkiewicz at the Blossom Kent inaugural program and went on to be an artist-in-residence at the Dayton Art Institute and a visiting artist at the Living Arts Program, an immersive multi-cultural creative project in art, music, dance, theater, and writing. I have a memorable collection of children’s work from that special time. Everything from the powerful reactive painting by a teenager during George Wallace’s run for President to a wonderful, complete page of orange paint done by a four-year-old that I know, that began as a donkey and got bigger and bigger and bigger until it filled the page.”
When Inconiglios teaches, he wants the students to consider and use the whole page. “One of my favorite tools is a brush on a bamboo stick for charcoal, ink, and paint. Through this, they have to work with their whole bodies on the paper; I love these props. Sometimes, I use clay, collage, and paint with ‘children of all ages’. I also give them a collage table with tape and a staple gun. I have a charming letter from one very young artist, ‘I love art and the stapler!’”
Who and what are your influences beyond daily life?
“Clifford Still, Jack Youngman, Roy Lichtenstein, Mark Rothko’s surfaces, and Alexander Calder’s circus series among others plus the influence of my travel experiences, especially when I visited Haiti in the 80s and saw George Liautaud’s sculpture. His figurative sculptures cast shadows and have a cutout feel, which I love. Masks and faces have always been important to me. I started making the collaged faces in the 1970s, cutting and stapling them together and hanging them on the wall. They became ‘friends’ in the studio. This led to the finding of objects as masks. I discovered these ‘faces’ on the streets; I didn’t clean or change them. There are various stories here; when photographed, they appear to take on another role entirely.”
As we walk to the back of the studio, I see a table of found objects, all of which look like masks and faces. Some even appear as dogs. A wire sculpture hangs in the space reminiscent of a Dubuffet face. “The excitement of discovery is ever present; every time I walk the dog in the city, I take pictures, for example of little graffiti details or the torn walls on Ninth Avenue. I continue this picture-taking whenever I travel, so my thousands of pictures include winery walls in Italy, buildings in Hastings UK, and roads in North Carolina and LA. These images can look as good as any big painting.”
Have you worked on collaborations with other artists?
“I worked on dance collaborations with Isabel Gotzkowsky, which we installed at The Kitchen NYC and in Brooklyn. I still have the drawings and the small foam core model used to build the big set. I’m constantly pushing people to work collaboratively, most recently working with Music Mountain’s Summer Festival in Falls Village. We introduced ‘Painting Music’ in 2018 for the 40th Anniversary of the Voyager, painting to music performed by world-renowned Cassatt String Quartet and Music Mountain director, Oskar Espina Ruiz. This past July we reversed the process whereby the music students responded to the marks and art and then the artists responded to the music, so the process continued back and forth. The artists ranged in age from eight years old to mid-eighties. I talked about artists Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Georgia O’Keefe and their relationship to music.”
Inconiglios’s work also collaborates with the objects found in New York City streets and on San Francisco walls, as well as during his other travel adventures; each city’s character unveils new treasures: a Ronald Reagan mask in a parking lot in New York, a rearview mirror of a truck. “When I find things in the street like this, they just sort of talk to me. ”
Inconiglios’s early exploration of circular forms has consistently carried throughout his practice, again seeing these shapes dispersed in daily street life from hubcaps and manhole covers to the ubiquitous donuts and their surrounding negative spaces. Referring to this ongoing series as The Donut Series allowed him to focus purely on exploring variations within that one basic form. He found the circle endlessly fascinating as a formal element in his work. The “donut” notation added a touch of humor.
If you could steal a piece of work from anywhere in the world, what would you steal?
“Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, 1480, from the Frick in New York. Artist Robert Wolfe told me about this painting when I was 18. Every time I see it, I see something else; you must keep looking at the same thing to find nuances. The last time I saw it was at the old Whitney, when the Frick temporarily moved its collection there during the renovations at the Frick. It was interesting as that was the first time I ever saw it on a museum wall versus seeing it in the Frick mansion on 71st Street.”
Do you have shows coming up?
“Yes, in New York at the beautifully renovated Cinema Supply on 21st Street in Chelsea; a sizable space filling three floors where Wolf Kahn’s studio was on the top floor. This building was originally a lumber yard in the 20s, which evolved into Star Cinema Supply for movie makers in the 70s and 80s. The building has been renovated using some of the original structural materials into a high-end work and art venue. Curated over the three floors are approximately 40 of my works from the last two decades and one additional painting from 1967. You can see the show by appointment. •
To learn more, Inconiglios’s current show is at Cinema Supply: 217 21st Street NYC, by appointment only. Email concierge@cinema.supply. Venue website: cinema.supply or gallery’s website morrisongallery.com. Inconiglios’s Instagram @vincentinconiglios and website: vincentinconiglios.com.