Anthony Iacono: Sticky Fingers

December 13 - February 15, 2026

Anthony Iacono: Sticky Fingers
December 13, 2025 – February 15, 2026
Press Contact: info@laurathegallery.com

Laura (the gallery)
1125 E 11th St, Houston, TX

Laura (the gallery) is pleased to present Sticky Fingers, a solo exhibition by Philadelphia based artist Anthony Iacono, featuring a series of his signature cut paper collages. Composed from individually painted, washed, and meticulously sliced sheets of paper, these works depict tightly cropped vignettes of queer bodies, focused almost entirely on hands. At first glance, the images appear frictionless, recalling digital renderings or airbrush painting. Only through sustained looking do their material truths emerge: crisp incisions, visible joins, and intentionally jagged edges that interrupt the illusion of seamlessness. Touch, rather than vision, becomes the governing sense.

In Sticky Fingers, hands function as both subject and syntax. They filch objects from the pockets of unwitting figures, cradle books with studied delicacy, toy with gloves, roses, rings, and metal pommels that may belong to swords or walking sticks. These gestures hover in a state of suspension. A gloved hand feels at once seductive and menacing. Is it an invitation, or an act of apprehension? The works unfold in this charged ambiguity, where intimacy and threat coexist, and where desire is never fully decoupled from risk.

Iacono’s images quietly echo the visual language of early modern portraiture, particularly the work of Hans Holbein the Younger, whose paintings relied on accessories and gestures to signal wealth, intellect, piety, and power. In Holbein’s portraits, rings, books, cuffs, and blades operated as compressed codes, legible to those fluent in their social grammar. Iacono reanimates this economy of symbols, stripping away the face and amplifying the hand as a site of disclosure. Frilled sleeves, doublets, and ornamental objects drift free of their historical anchors, becoming queer signals untethered from fixed identity.

Across time, queer life has often unfolded through such coded exchanges. Today, desire may surface in sex clubs or darkened corridors; in earlier eras, a narrow Venetian alley could be the site of a sensual or fatal encounter. Iacono’s collages inhabit this unstable terrain. Their tight crops mirror the conditions of queer legibility itself: partial, oblique, and dependent on recognition. A hand holding two roses may signify romance, bait, or ritual. A book may promise intellect or act as a shield. Meaning flickers, never fully resolving.

Despite their latent tension, the works in Sticky Fingers are deeply tender. They offer intimate glimpses rather than spectacles, rewarding viewers who lean in close. The visible seams and jagged borders resist polish, insisting on the presence of the artist’s hand and the labor of assembly. In allowing these edges to remain, Iacono refuses the fantasy of total coherence. What emerges instead is a quiet eroticism rooted in touch, proximity, and the pleasures of careful looking.

Anthony Iacono (b. 1987, Nyack, NY) earned his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Sculpture + Extended Media, and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013, and has been an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, LMCC Workspace, and ISCP. He has had solo exhibitions at PPOW Gallery (2015, 2018), The Approach (2019), Capsule Shanghai (2020), The Spite Haus (2022), and Marinaro (2018, 2021, 2023), where he is represented. In 2017, he was a recipient of the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship Award. He lives and works in Philadelphia.

For inquiries or additional materials, please contact info@laurathegallery.com.