Visit the Birdbath online viewing room here

The Hole and Tombolo are pleased to present Birdbath, a solo exhibition by Julian MacMillan, the 2025-2026 Tombolo artist in residence. Across sixteen new paintings and sculptures, we see loons, swans, swirling eddies and dangling feet, rendered in the artist's signature graphic language. Above and below the water line, the works draw on the tradition of the landscape as idyll, played against a darker vision of the water’s surface as a boundary with the afterlife.

While the artist has always held art-making to be fundamentally funerary, this body of work in particular looks to a tomb painting from antiquity, “The Tomb of The Diver” (circa 470 B.C.E.) a rare, intact example of Greek funerary fresco depicting a youth flinging himself off a rock into the water below. He is poised between two worlds; the earthly terrain of the above ground and the water rushing up to meet him, symbolizing the passage from life to death. Tomb Painting (Diver) depicts this reference most literally, with the diver's feet caught mid-air. Across all the paintings, we see this through-line expanded and remixed with striking narrative clarity—from steps in Supportive Smoker to a loon in a hellish-red underworld in Self-Discovery / Self-Improvement.

The loon, which slips darkly and silently between these realms, enacts the vision of the psychopomp, a guide for the dead across the threshold from life to the afterlife, from the Greek for "soul conductor”. The loon motif is also a personal one for the artist, drawing on the mystery and mournfulness of the bird in the wild, where it’s known to disappear underwater for long periods. MacMillan spent months on a lake in Vermont during the pandemic where the first decoy was carved and birds began to migrate onto the canvas. There is a lightness of touch to the way the artist uses charcoal and oilstick which is in tension with the density of color and the darkness of the work’s themes. Painted on burlap and rough canvas, the darkly saturated grain of the fabric itself is gorgeously on view.

Throughout the paintings MacMillan attends to the surface of the water, imagined as a permeable barrier between the known world and murkier, unknown realms. That fluid skin is perceived as both reflection and lens, a magnifying glass for our fears and desires. Surface Tension, swirls these boundaries, the diving loon displacing water, pouring pastel skies into underwater indigo. In Emerging Loon both diver and Loon come up for air, water rippling concentrically away from each. In the fully submerged Visitation, lightness and ladder elude to the world above but the direction of travel is unclear. In Tomb Painting (Bathtub), underground trees and caverns make reference to the regional and historical practice of dowsing—or water-witching—a means of divining the location of underground bodies of water through possibly magical means.

In the center of the gallery, decoys flock around an eight-foot stainless steel birdbath. The decoy sculptures map the artist’s interest in design onto three dimensions, creating avatars whose hallucinatory plumage hints at the supernatural. (The avatar, from the Sanskrit avatāra ‘descent’, is defined as “a manifestation of a deity or released soul in bodily form on earth; an incarnate divine teacher.”) The hand-carved sculptures and metalwork highlight MacMillan’s sculptural prowess in a predominantly painting show. The decoys, their bases and the larger-than-life birdbath are all fabricated in Red Hook, Brooklyn at the artist’s studio and at Friendly Metals, the artist-run metal studio where he works.

Julian MacMillan (b. 1992) lives and works in New York. Working across painting, printmaking and sculpture he creates work that resembles abstract portraits, anthropomorphic landscapes, and geometric studies. Through his multidisciplinary practice, which also spans carpentry and metalworking, MacMillan is able to combine and compress these genres, and make images that are both sensitive and other-worldly. Born and raised in Washington DC, MacMillan studied art at Dartmouth College prior to receiving his MFA in painting at Boston University. Recent exhibitions include Left Tower at Atlantic Mills (Providence, RI), Do It Again at East Manning Projects (Providence, RI), The View From Mars at Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA) and Tell The Devil I'm Coming As Fast As I Can at Outlet Manhattan, New York, NY.

A limited-edition Tombolo shirt inspired by Julian's work will be available for purchase at the opening and on Tombolo’s website. Read more about Tombolo's artist in residency program here.