Scott Csoke | The Carnival of the Animals

July 24 - August 22, 2025

Sargent’s Daughters is excited to present Carnival of the Animals, Brooklyn-based painter Scott Csoke’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The title references the 1886 composition by Camille Saint-Saëns, and the paintings on view appropriate and reframe art historical depictions of animals as expressive avatars of queer experience. Presented in a site-specific installation by the artist, Csoke’s swans, hounds, horses, and cranes play with ideas of gender, decoration, and humor.

In Saint-Saëns’ “The Carnival of the Animals,” fourteen musical movements each represent a different creature, ranging from lions to hens to tortoises and more. The composition broke many of the rules of classical music, replicating motifs from popular songs and misusing technical practices to create something humorous and innovative.  Saint-Saëns’ playful process of  experimentation and appropriation mirrors Csoke’s practice, as well as their understanding of queerness as being “in on the joke,” self aware and tongue-in-cheek, gleefully subverting normative categories of gender and sexuality.

Each acrylic painting on view reproduces 18th and 19th century pastoral or hunting scenes. The original paintings employed animals as symbols of identity, reflecting their owner’s wealth, status, or virility. Csoke renders these historical images in loose brushstrokes that dispense with the glossy pretension of academic oil painting. Depicted in a close crop or isolated from their larger composition, the animals themselves become the focus of the works, each adorned with a delicate rainbow. 

Csoke has transformed the gallery into a fantastical cabinet of curiosities, with hand-painted lines sketching out ornate architectural details. The murals suggest a  luxurious domestic interior, of the type often decorated with pastoral scenes. This installation highlights the original purpose of those paintings - as decoration - while also contesting the idea of “decorative” as pejorative. Csoke’s work reveals that decoration carries profound meaning, as it has often been the area in which queer people are able to present themselves most authentically. Refusing simple representation, their work instead locates queerness in processes of citation, accumulation, and self-fashioning, playfully expanding the boundaries of  “queer art.”

Scott Csoke (b. 1993, Rockville, MD) is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. They received their BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Recent exhibitions include Alexander DiJulio (New York, NY), Sargent’s Daughters (New York, NY), Timothy Taylor (New York, NY), Auxier Klien (New York, NY), and Quirk Gallery (Richmond, VA). Csoke’s work has been featured in Artforum, New York Magazine, and Apartment Therapy. They have collaborated with Anthropologie, Christian Cowan, LAZOSCHMIDL, Loeffer Randall, Clare V., Framebridge, The Greenbrier, and more.