New York: Atticus Wakefield | After the Allegory

Incubator is pleased to present After the Allegory, a new body of work by Atticus Wakefield, in which the artist continues his exploration of painting as a site where myth, sensation, and anatomy converge. These works mark a shift from the physicality of the body in his previous body of work to a more expansive inquiry into how we perceive, map, and mythologize our place in the world.

Rooted in the visual language of the Baroque, Wakefield draws from allegorical paintings by Rubens, Snyders, and Bruegel. Yet where these historical works revel in surface and abundance, Wakefield dissects them. Using anatomical diagrams of tongues, olfactory nerves, and dissected retinas, he overlays biological precision onto painterly opulence. The result is a rupture: sensation not as symbol, but as system.

In these works, bodies are porous, destabilized, and continuous with the world around them. Wakefield collapses the intimate scale of anatomy with the vastness of the cosmos, referencing everything from Venus and Andromeda to Richard Feynman’s quantum diagrams. Myth and science orbit one another, pointing to a shared desire to understand what lies beyond visible reality.

Rather than offering answers, Wakefield’s paintings operate as charts of sensation, maps of meaning in flux. They are neither linear nor illustrative, but experiential: rhythmic, muscular, and charged with a tension between precision and chaos. Figures emerge, dissolve, and reconstitute in fields of charged colour and restless mark-making.

This new body of work extends Wakefield’s ongoing investigation into desire, violence, and the limits of the visible. But where earlier works revelled in corporeal immediacy, here the gaze turns outward and inward at once – toward the stars, the cells, and the strange, unstable terrain in between.