The Hole is proud to announce our second solo exhibition with British-born, Brooklyn-based artist Xavier Baxter. Following his 2024 Los Angeles debut, Titans, this new body of work, Carnage, presents a more raw, more personal chapter for the artist. Fourteen new large-scale oil paintings will fill our Bowery gallery with slashing gestures, smeared limbs, and painterly violence. In the back gallery, a site-specific installation transforms the space into a refrigerator box from Baxter’s childhood.

Baxter’s paintings are unrelenting. He attacks the canvas with brushes, trowels, scrapers—building dense fields of oil paint that churn with energy and threat. Figures stagger through the wreckage, across surfaces are layered, torn open and rebuilt. The works seem to depict an aftermath—paintings as explosions, as breakdowns, as physical records of psychological weather. Carnage piles up the parts with loads of limbs, a clattering of bone and pounds of flesh. These paintings walk a line between control and release, trained technique and raw instinct, Baxter leans into disorder—letting each canvas hold the trace of a battle, a purge, a burst of something urgent and unfiltered.

The installation in the back gallery is a full-scale recreation of a refrigerator box that Baxter once lived in as a child. In a photograph from the time, he’s beaming in bed with a boom box and a Snoopy plush, surrounded by chaotic cardboard walls covered in enthusiastic scribbles. In the studio today, Baxter generates a ton of cardboard in his process—laying it on the floor to catch strays, clear brushes, or smear scrapings. These discarded surfaces accumulate paint like a diary of accidents, which he now brings into the installation, covering the walls and floor of the space with the textures of both past and present. This piece evokes a time when creativity was private, fearless, and free: it's less about nostalgia than staying connected to that first, feral version of making: before anyone told you how art should look, or what it should mean.

Xavier Baxter (b. 1991, London) studied sculpture at City & Guilds of London Art School before relocating to Brooklyn, where he now lives and works. He has exhibited internationally, with solo shows at Vigo Gallery and Union Gallery in London, Jack Hanley Gallery in New York, and PIERMARQ* in Sydney. His work is held in numerous private collections across the U.S., U.K., and Europe.