Linus Borgo
(Stamford, Connecticut, 1995 - )
American
Linus Borgo’s work deals with themes of spiritual elevation, identity, and reclamation of the body. Immersive in both scale and content, his paintings oscillate between sublime depictions of the aftermath of trauma, expansive references to mythology, and quotidian moments of daily life.
Much of Borgo’s work is grounded in a formative experience he encountered at the age of 18. Having just begun his BFA at Rhode Island School of Design, Borgo was in a life-altering accident: After climbing to the top of a building with his friend, he made contact with electrical generator equipment and was shocked with 11,000 volts. Following the accident, he underwent 11 surgeries, including the amputation of his left hand. In the years since he has developed and deployed his painting practice as a means of grappling with the new physical and metaphysical limits of the body he lives in, a journey that echoes his experience as a transgender man. 1
While most of Borgo’s earliest works provide a diaristic, unvarnished, and everyday approach to autobiography and explorations of transgender identity and disability, the artist’s interests underwent a significant shift during his MFA studies. Alongside rapidly increasing polish in composition and technique, his paintings turned toward the surreal and the spiritual. To name two particularly formative works: Autotomy in the Liminal Realm: Splitting Time With A Scalpel (2021) shows the artist after the amputation of his hand, surrounded by medical personnel, not in a surgical suite, but amid the night sky and held like Christ being deposed from the cross; I Sing the Body Electric (2022) transposes the artist’s fateful electrocution from a city into the woods, where light radiates from his body and illuminates the surrounding space. In works like these, Borgo seems to have found that probing and sharing the inner truths of his experiences would require new strategies, which might prove bolder and more capacious than straightforward depictions of recognizable scenes.
Amid this change, themes from classical mythology have become central to much of Borgo’s work. After the Fall of Phaeton (2022) references a figure from Greek legend who lost control of the chariot that pulls the sun across the sky and was struck down by Zeus with a bolt of lightning—a connection to Borgo’s own electrocution. In Narcissus at the Halsey Street Oasis (2023), Borgo positions himself as Narcissus, who became infatuated with his reflection while gazing into a river and remained fixed there for so long that he eventually turned into a flower. Here, Borgo works to parody and protest theories that describe gender transition as a form of self-obsession. Elsewhere, as the sociologist Jack Halberstam notes, “The merman is a recurring figure in the artist’s oeuvre, meant to embody and sanctify the experience of existing in a liminal state. In Borgo’s painted universe, the merman is a protest against dualisms that construct binaries between human and animal; man and woman; mind and body.”2
Borgo’s recent exhibition Linus Borgo: Monstrum at Yossi Milo Gallery continues with this connection to mythology. Halberstam writes: “The original meaning of monstrum, after all, comes from the Latin monstro—to show and the word moneo—to warn. And a monstrum, for the Romans, was a sign from the gods indicating that a natural order has been disrupted. Modern interpretations of the meaning of the word monstrum assume that any time something unnatural emerges into the order of things, it means something bad, but this is not necessarily so. The disruptive potential of a monstrum could reveal unwelcome truths, or it could indicate the limits of conventional knowledge systems, or a monstrum could be a gateway to new understandings of the body altogether. The monstrum was hybrid. Hybridity of the monstrous and wondrous kind populates the worlds Borgo imagines, envisions, and paints.”3 In short, the artist repurposes the term not only because it can be used quite fittingly to explain that transgender identity has positive disruptive potential that can reveal important truths, but also because the history of the term shows that beneficial disruption of this sort is not as new as the contemporary emergence of transgender politics might suggest. Approaches of this kind pervade Borgo’s work, in which thoughtfully deployed references and connections are themselves hybrid, multiple, and rich with possibility.
Borgo’s work has been exhibited throughout the US, including at the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, TX and Lenfest Center for the Arts in New York, NY. Recently, he was awarded the Betty Lee Stern Prize for Artists at Columbia University School of the Arts. Borgo was awarded the Anderson Ranch Fellowship at Rhode Island School of Design, where he received his BFA (2018), as well as the Brevoort-Eickemeyer Fellowship at Columbia University, from which he holds an MFA (2022). The artist currently lives and works in New York, NY and is represented by Yossi Milo Gallery.
1 The first portion of this biography has been lightly adapted from text provided by Yossi Milo Gallery
2 Jack Halberstam, “Monstrum: The Portentous Worlds of Linus Borgo,” exhibition essay provided by Yossi Milo Gallery.
3 Halberstam, “Monstrum: The Portentous Worlds of Linus Borgo.”
New York, New York
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