KYLE STAVER: THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH
NINO MIER GALLERY is pleased to present Kyle Staver’s third solo exhibition with the gallery titled, The Greatest Show on Earth, opening November 7th at our Tribeca location.
November 07 – December 16, 2025
Kyle Staver doesn’t believe in stillness. Her paintings move and breathe, heave and pulse, thrust and spin us around like the trapeze artists they depict. Staver now proudly defines herself as a storyteller – an artistic identity that was discouraged in the formalist art world of her younger adult years, and at Yale, where she studied in the 1980s. Her subject matter has evolved from depictions of personal familial lore and everyday life, into fairy tales and Greek mythology. Staver was in search of universally understood stories, rather than subjective ones, so that she and the viewer could “hold hands” in mutual recognition. She brought a feminist correction to these myths, presenting the women as strong heroines with agency over their situations. For example, she often re-contextualizes stories of rape and abduction that dominate the Western art historical canon – Europa and the Bull, Leda and the Swan – as consensual, safe love affairs. However, Staver has recently turned her gaze from Greek goddesses to mighty American women. The circus as subject was the answer.
In telling her stories, Staver has never been interested in a frozen moment. She doesn’t look to Piero della Francesca, Poussin, or Balthus. Instead, her pantheon includes Courbet, Rembrandt, and Renoir. The lion tamers, acrobats, dancers, and equestrians she depicts arc around the canvas with upended legs, twirling scarves and flying tutus. She directs our eyes and attention to dart and dance along with the performers through brilliant accents of light, dynamic color, and echoing, rhyming curves and patterns like zebras’ stripes, lion’s teeth, and bursting fireworks.
Another form that repeats through this new body of work is the American flag. What can we make of utilizing this symbol in our current moment? The flag, and the bald eagle, have been co-opted in American politics, over the past decade, as indicators of far-Right Republicanism. In the 2024 election cycle, Democrats sought to reclaim “patriotism” to herald democratic ideals and freedoms. Perhaps Staver’s use of the flag is another way she re-frames stories through a more just lens.
Politics aside, the flag is another way of “holding hands” with the viewer: it is a decidedly recognizable visual form. These are American paintings, and they depict a form of entertainment that was broadly available across socioeconomic and geographic strata. It is a way to get back to her roots – “The Greatest Show on Earth” – the Americana of her Minnesota childhood. The circus, as we know it, is a uniquely American phenomenon, tied to Western expansion, the development of the railroad, and American imperialism. The circus was most viewers’ first encounter with exotic animals; lions, elephants, tigers, zebras were in turn connected with, and symbols of, European colonialism. These are power dynamics that Staver has perpetually undone and remade in her paintings, through humor, exuberance, and humanism.