Sometime Somewhere Someone Is Dancing

Lola Stong-Brett's gestural paintings merge cartoon figures, ocean imagery, and fragmented text to explore human connection, loss, and emotional currents.

Why go

Stong-Brett's body-scale works layer diaristic mark-making with recurring characters (Popeye, Bimbo) drawn from working-class animation history, creating scenes that evoke Bruegel's narrative density while remaining intensely personal—this is her U.S. debut.

What to expect

Large-scale oil paintings on canvas featuring cartoon-like figures emerging from gestural abstraction, interspersed with ships and rafts as symbols of vulnerability and survival, alongside obscured first-person text fragments woven into the compositions.

Things to know

• Artist's first solo exhibition in New York and U.S. debut.
• Recently completed the Tracey Emin Artist Residency (2024).
• Works reference Max Fleischer's early animations, positioning Popeye as emblem of working-class representation.
• Paintings incorporate sporadic writings, notes, and poems by the artist as integral compositional elements.
• Born in London; currently lives and works in Margate.
• First solo show, For That, I'll Always Smile, presented at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate in 2025.