January 8 – February 14, 2026
Hoffman Donahue, New York
This exhibition should be imagined as a pool fed by ornate fountains at either end of a columned bath house;
the spouts carved in marble as tortoise and fish. Or as two opposing bubble machines, singers, loudspeakers,
or flood lights. In this way, the monitors that face each other across gallery space are generative of the artwork
in between. In the way these are soaked, inflected, or quickened. Like flowers or hatching battery chicks,
the lines of prints are already delaminating, both formally as empty frames and unframed prints. But also, in
terms of ‘content’, or imagery, which multiplies or peels off like butterflies, as religious, biographical, animal
and flower- based allusion. Crows picking and feeding, silhouetted against the white of the gallery walls like
Brueghel’s corvids in the snow.
Worm: (Tribute to Nancy H(oooo)lt), 2026, comprises 16 frames cast in resin, fiber glass and papier-mâché as
faux wood, presented as a singular Rococo-scopic tube running the length of the space.
The film Earley, which provides the title for the exhibition, is presented on the monitor to the right as you
enter the space. Merging sub-Beckettian monologue with the ‘Horror’ formats of dementia and ‘First world’
problems of ‘over-living’, this involves a filmed performance/ conversation between a figure and a sculpture
at a suburban railway station near Reading (which is near London) in the UK, ‘…sweltering in melting pollen,
mosquitoes, coagulating ideology’ and smeared with the cliches of serial killers, religious zealotry and/or eco-
vengeance.
On the wall next to the film, is the sculpture, Flies, 2026. “And the flies… the flies arrive diagonally, to feed and
breed, to irritate us or maybe they are trying to help us. Maybe they are just being friendly as well.”
The second film Exuberant Blooms/Fox, 2025, which faces you at the far end of the gallery, is composed
using the Exuberant Blooms animated typeface, writing the story that begins with ‘a smiling dead fox at the
bottom of a disused well’ and continuing from this point to describe a monstrous and miraculous death-
birth. Exuberant Blooms animated typeface is described as ‘… an expression of beauty and transformation
… revolution even … but with a hint of playfulness and irreverence. The future will arrive come what may and
the mighty will be eaten by worms. Compost for future transformations. Our time will come! Including a full
alphabet, lower and uppercase, figures and special characters’.
John Russell is an artist, performer and typeface designer based in London. He was a co-founder of the
artists’ group BANK, of which he was a member for ten years participating in over fifty exhibitions and events,
as well as several publications. Since leaving BANK in January 2000, Russell has worked both independently
and collaboratively in producing exhibitions, curatorial projects, and publications as artworks including editing
and designing the collectively written trilogy Frozen Tears, a crossbreed between bestseller and horror series
comprised of texts by Art & Language, Ulrike Meinhof, Lucie McKenzie, Fabienne Audéoud and others.
Russell (b. 1963, London, UK) studied History of Art at Goldsmith’s College of Art and Fine Art at Slade School
of Art and Saint Martin’s School of Art. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at venues including
Arcadia Missa, London, as part of Condo London and co-hosted by Bridget Donahue, New York and High Art,
Paris (2024); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2022); High Art, Arles (2021); Bridget Donahue, New York (2021
and 2018); High Art, Paris (2017); and Kunsthalle Zürich (2017). Group exhibitions include Hoffman Donahue
and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills (2025); Smilers, New York (2025); Viborg Kunsthal, Viborg (2018);
Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2018); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2017); and Tate Britain, London
(2010).
Reading School of Art 