Horton Gallery, Chelsea is pleased to announce Romantic Agony, a group show featuring the artists Ion Birch, Doron Langberg, Jacques Louis Vidal, and Summer Wheat.

Borrowing it’s title from the seminal text by Mario Praz, a treatise on the sensual sensibility in romantic literature, the exhibition Romantic Agony explores a debauched vision of the erotic in art that does away with any idealized notions of the body or the pleasures it seeks. Collected here are works that explore a darker strain of sexuality. Unapologetically carnal and verging on the grotesque, these artists subvert the overwhelming tendency to tame and aestheticize the sexual act. They capture instead, sexual energy en brute, a state of ecstatic convulsion and chaos.