NIKKI MALOOF: AROUND THE CLOCK
Perrotin Paris is delighted to present Around the Clock, the first solo exhibition of the American artist Nikki Maloof, and its second with the gallery.
November 23, 2024 – January 25, 2025
With her exhibition Around the Clock, Nikki Maloof explores the diversity and complexity of the material and perceptible world. Each domestic scene that she represents shows the depth of daily life and shares an intimate experience of her joys, hopes, or fears. Offering an original interpretation of the still life to reflect on the state of our world 1, her audacious painting—combining beauty, mischief, and darkness—puts our relationship to the instability of life into perspective. While one thing contains so many others, everything that reconditions our connection to (re)productive time (work, parenting) participates in the emotional density of her artwork.
There is a connection here to Emily Dickinson, who, isolated and reclusive in her family home in the Puritan austerity of 19th–century New England, described with astonishing modernity the chaos of her inner life and its sentimental, sometimes mystical, experiences. Her concise, elliptical poetry, which she described as “explosive and fitful,” allowed her to become a man, a woman, or an object.
Choosing to leave behind American urban life, Nikki Maloof lives in the countryside of western Massachusetts. In her recent paintings, she focuses on vital actions such as eating, washing, discussing, or sleeping. These recurring moments are part of the process of constructing our identity. “In the private sphere, away from the eyes of others, in close contact with desires, weakness, relationships of intimate power,” the art of living frees itself from the social gaze, sketching a geography that is both personal and relational. If the house is a world unto itself, a bedroom, a bathroom, a dining room, a garden, or a kitchen become the spatial expressions of our consciousness.
With this current-day look at domesticity, Maloof distances herself from a strictly androcentric and anthropocentric vision. Blurring the boundaries between species and kingdoms through an overarching equality between ordinary things and beings, she constructs an oeuvre of attachment and detachment.