NICOLA TYSON: A SURVEY OF DRAWINGS
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition by Nicola Tyson. A survey of drawings charts the development of the artist’s “instant inventions” over the course of the past fifteen years.
February 27 – March 30, 2024
An investigation of creaturehood unfolds throughout the exhibition, as biomorphic parts shade into abstraction. Limbs meld with plants, eyes lapse into vacant orbs, and bodies become geometries throughout the graphite, acrylic, ink, and colored pencil works on paper. The works offer an unmediated version of Tyson’s distinctive vision, one attuned to the most peculiar forms of embodiment.
Tyson is known for breathing life into hybrid beasts with disjointed anatomies – constructions imbued with affects ranging from humor to horror to pathos. The earlier works such as Tall Drawing #10 (2008) and Tall Drawing #13 (2009) tap into an alienated existential angst, where isolated half-figures emerge alone within blank grounds. Feminist discourses about abjection and the porousness of identity resonate throughout the exhibition, especially in this early work.
In subsequent years, Tyson tapped further into what she has called an “animal consciousness,” one exploring nonhuman alterity. In these works, worlds tilt as compositions become points of connection rather than portals to the alienated world – a transformation that includes but extends beyond a single, human subject. Titles became an increasingly important feature of her practice as well, offering a conceptual frame for each composition.
A series of acrylic monoprints on paper titled Head #1-8 (2016) formally register this shift from alienation to interconnectedness. Tyson created these monoprints by painting portraits of heads on glass, then pressing a piece of paper to the glass with varying degrees of intensity. She would not alter the image once it had been pressed onto paper.
For Tyson, this process was a way to escape drawing and an enduring “battle with the line” that curtails her approach to form. The final composition emerges though the contact between paper and glass, through the uniting of disparate parts.
In all, the exhibition offers viewers a glimpse of Tyson’s compulsive relationship to conjuring new forms without premeditation. She likens this process to handwriting – a type of communication so intuitive that it can become a direct transmutation of thought. This is a unique sentiment from a painter, as many revel in the purely material features of working with paint. But for Tyson, the image reigns.