Mamie Tinkler

Ulterior Gallery is pleased to present Everything Is Romantic, Mamie Tinkler’s third solo exhibition with gallery. The exhibition includes new paintings in both oil and watercolor, made over the past year.

The exhibition’s title is taken from the Charli XCX song of the same name from her album Brat. With this reference, the artist embraces the historic scope of Romanticism (Caspar David Friedrich, Charlotte Brontë) as well as the glib modern usage. The paintings speak to the poignancy of human experience that the past few years have heightened: a sense that we are watching something end, and an effort to grasp at it while we still can.

Romantic is the fatal duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr on the cliffs of Weehawken still haunting the garish Manhattan skyline. Romantic are the saintly busts posed together in Santa Maria Novella outside the train station in Florence, entombing the bodily fragments of the holy dead in their carved robes. Romantic is the lone White Oak, bathed in the glow of a late summer evening. Romantic is the rusted finial on a crumbling parapet, in which a squirrel has made its home.

Whereas Tinkler’s recent work deployed theatricality and compositional confusion to create images both realistic and unreal, the paintings in Everything is romantic seek transcendence in everyday life: less staged, more observed. Still, painting remains a medium for discovering facets of experience that the casual glance or the impulsive photograph fail to record. The paintings in romantic consider realism to be a process of close reading and careful translation—above all, a recording of presence.

Mamie Tinkler (b. 1978, Memphis, TN) has exhibited paintings in group and solo shows, mostly in New York and sometimes elsewhere, for about 15 years. She was recently included in the group exhibition Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 at MOCA, Los Angeles, (2024–25). Solo exhibitions include those at Ulterior, as well as Tops Gallery Memphis and The Suburban in Chicago. A Troubling, her last solo show with Ulterior, was reviewed in The New York Times; her previous solo show was the subject of an interview in Artforum.com. Parts of this exhibition were developed at the 100 West Residency in Corsicana, Texas, where Tinkler was an artist in residence last year. Born in Tennessee, she lived in New York for 30 years before moving to Millrift, Pennsylvania in 2026.