Isaac Lythgoe: Everyone’s a Bad Guy

Kutlesa is pleased to announce Everyone's a Bad Guy, a solo exhibition by Isaac Lythgoe. This exhibition marks the artist's first solo exhibition in New York.

Isaac Lythgoe’s practice is an act of world-building. Reimagining narrative traditions and modes of storytelling, he creates interconnected works that probe power structures, contemporary ethics, and shifting social norms. Within this constructed universe, arcs of romance and mortality intersect, inviting viewers to consider how collective memory is formed—and what future societies might resemble. This temporal drift between past and future is mirrored in Lythgoe’s aesthetic language, where tensions between the natural and the synthetic unfold through form, material, and gesture.

In Everyone’s a Bad Guy, Lythgoe positions the wedding—the quintessential real-life fairytale—as a metaphor for performance, aspiration, and social mobility. His recent works challenge us to interrogate the trustworthiness of institutions in an era increasingly defined as post-truth. Within this framework, the wedding emerges as both a site of authenticity and an analogue for broader mechanisms of power: the corporate merger, the strategic alliance, the hostile takeover.

Across seven paintings, Lythgoe directs our attention to the familiar accoutrements of a wedding: suits, dresses, immaculate confections. Yet the characters populating these scenes betray their surroundings. They are not merely guests but staff and workers, ensnared in the excess of the event. The imagery is subtly infused with violence, competition, and voyeurism, revealing a celebration underwritten by tension.

Anchoring the exhibition is its titular work, a central sculpture that serves as a guide through this orchestrated chaos. The three-headed anamorphic figure evokes both Cerberus—the mythic guardian of the underworld—and the Disneyfied Big Bad Wolf: menacing, alluring, and fatally overconfident. Simultaneously bent over an office desk and reclining seductively against it, the figure’s hollowed torso and forward-thrust face recall the wolf blowing down houses of wood and straw. Positioned above the visceral human interactions that animate the paintings, the sculpture assumes the role of master of ceremonies: antagonist-in-chief, wedding official, and the impenetrable face of corporate power.