NICOLA TYSON: I AM A TEAPOT

Petzel is pleased to present I am a teapot, an exhibition of new paintings by British-born, New York-based artist Nicola Tyson.

January 16 - February 22, 2025

Tyson’s new works fuse painterly rigor with a shrewd, quick-witted sensibility, generating complex, evocative compositions. Painting intuitively, Tyson’s negotiation of both gestural expression and formal virtuosity elucidates singular representations of queer subjectivity.

Alluding to the 1939 nursery rhyme and its accompanying dance, “I’m a Little Teapot,” the title of the exhibition is both playful and physical, weaving two bodies of her work through the gallery. In one set of paintings, Tyson employs a color wash to prime her canvases, building her characters around their eyes, which are left blank to reveal the raw ground. These pictures demonstrate Tyson pushing at her own boundaries, bridging tensions between freedom and restraint.

While many of Tyson’s canvases use a color wash as a foundation, in a separate set of paintings, she leaves the ground, and her figure’s eye ‘sockets,’ primed in white, further emphasizing a presence of uncanny animation before the viewer. Following her exhibition 90s Paintings last spring, Tyson decided to further develop this technique, which she began experimenting with decades ago. Here, Tyson brings a more overtly queer drive into play, such as in “The Embrace,” which depicts two entwined figures. In “Pillion,” a couple sit astride a dog-like creature, as they might on a motorbike, but share the same legs, conjoined as a kind of double.

As the artist states, the act of “conjuring an uncanny presence, something that looks back at you, whilst still addressing the Modernist rules of flatness and truth to material,” remains among her most salient concerns. Tyson operates outside a patriarchal script of representing gender, the body, and desire, responding to Hans Bellmer, Pablo Picasso, and others by disrupting the fetishistic male gaze. Tyson’s androgynous creatures are twinned, twisted, and semi-alive. Some animal, human, or in-between, her figures gaze back through the viewer, rejecting prescriptions of the gendered body.