Lovett/Codagnone

Participant Inc presents Lovett/Codagnone, Greetings, a solo exhibition focused on the collaborative team's early photographic practice from the mid ‘90s. This is the third in a sequence of exhibitions and estate activations made in collaboration with John Lovett and the Lovett/Codagnone Estate (1995-2019). Participant Inc facilitated an archival exhibition at CCS Bard, Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves, curated by Andrew Suggs, and their first survey exhibition, I Only Want You to Love Me, curated by Diego Sileo at Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan. Lovett/Codagnone will be included in the upcoming group exhibition, Vivono (They Live): HIV/AIDS in Italy, 1982-1996, curated by Michele Bertolino at Centro Pecci, Prato, Italy.

Early in their career together, Lovett/Codagnone explored an ethics of deindividualization in works that maximize the theoretical and emotional potential of their collaborative practice — a practice whereby power relations are consistently fraught and destabilized. Love and power have preoccupied Lovett/Codagnone's performance-based works in photography, video, and installation, in which their relationship, families, and physical limits have been systematically renegotiated through the use of cultural filters ranging from S/M role-playing to popular love songs, iconic cinematic and literary tropes. Their transgression of understood hierarchies, as manifested inexplicit cultural signifiers as well as clandestine or unconscious practices, strives toward a different kind of willful bonding, whose potential can subvert dynamics of power.

Lovett/Codagnone's formative photography-based works referenced S/M through the displacement of gay subcultural signifiers into suburban environments or urban public spaces, and often referenced historical photographs that were made privately or for private use, such as those of Pierre Molinier and Jimmy DeSana. Circulating widely in art as well as, at times, gay porn magazines, Lovett/Codagnone's photographs signaled the increasing conflation of public and private — a political imperative that defined the early 1990s. Alongside the performative bodily transgressions of artists such as Bob Flanagan, Ron Athey, and Catherine Opie, Lovett/Codagnone's restrained, conceptual exercises in the fluidity of dominance and submission also underscored the importance of sustained visibility, now inseparable from the methodologies of AIDS activism as practiced by collectives such as ACT UP and Gran Fury, with which their early work coincided. As culture inoculated itself against the destabilizing power of such practices through fashion and other mainstream depictions of S/M and drag performance, Lovett/Codagnone contested this assimilation and focused on the underlying dynamics of interaction that sexual roleplay can literalize, not only in relation to bonds of intimacy, but also in the context of familial and communal structures.

Lovett/Codagnone (1995-2019) is a New York based artist team that worked together from 1995 until Alessandro Codagnone's death in 2019. Lovett/Codagnone's art practice uses photography, performance, video, sound, and installation to address issues of collective identity and relations of power in social structures, focusing on the absorption of underground tactics of resistance. Important theoretical and aesthetic influences derive from the work of radical figures in literature, critical theory, cinema, theater, and punk. In 2008, they formed the band Candidate with musician Michele Pauli.

Their first retrospective I Only Want You to Love Me, curated by Diego Sileo, was presented at PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan in 2025. CCS Bard presented Lovett/Codagnone: Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves, curated by Andrew Suggs, also in 2025. Previous solo exhibitions include Death Disko: Last Dance, Francesco Pantaleone Arte Contemporanea, Milano, 2015; Museo Marino Marini, Florence; The Brick (formerly LA><ART), Los Angeles, 2012; September Galerie, Berlin, 2011; Sculpture Center, New York 2010; and MoMA PS1, New York 2007-2008. Their performances have been presented at New Museum, New York (2013); MoMA PS1, New York (2012); ICA Philadelphia (2010); Judson Memorial Church, New York (2010); and ICA Boston (2007). Their work has been shown at Centre Georges Pompidou Paris (2008); Cobra Museum, Amstelveen Holland (2008); The Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2005); De Appel Centre For Contemporary Art, Amsterdam (2005); Neue Gesellschaft fur Bildende Kunst, Berlin (2003); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2002).