Nick Mauss at 303 Gallery, New York
29 Feb – ongoing
Images Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
PR: Mauss also reimagines the threshold to the exhibition itself as an image plane on the scale of the body, inserting a set of painted doors that dramatize the viewer’s passage through the space, even implicating the viewer among the shifting frames, recurring figures, and points of contact set off in Mauss’ work. As art historian Gloria Sutton has written, Mauss’ work is “not simply about the movement of bodies but, rather, movement itself as a historiographic condition—a set of narrative frameworks used to interpret both proximity and distance and the transitions that occur in between. The ways bodies come together (as multitudes, constellations), as objects (collections), as fields of knowledge (disciplines), and commensurately, the ways bodies move apart, separate, retreat, and withdraw via diverse pressures (including acts of erasure and disavowal) within the current moment and throughout history remain of equal and pressing import.”
Mauss’ exhibition Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc. will be on view from February 7th, 2020 at Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland, and his 2018 work “Images in Mind” is installed at the Whitney Museum as part of The Whitney’s Collection: Selections from 1900-1965, and will be on view until 2021. His multi-part ceramic murals “Dispersed Events” were recently permanently installed in the I.M. Pei-designed Building 66 at M.I.T. Mauss’ book “Transmissions”, which expands on his 2018 exhibition at the Whitney, is forthcoming from Dancing Foxes Press and Yale University Press.
Nick Mauss (German/American, born 1980, New York, NY) is known for an expanded use of drawing that traces unexpected arcs into a multidisciplinary practice. Working in multiple mediums and scales — including reverse-painted mirrored glass, paper, ceramic, fabric, performance, and writing — Mauss practices a form of drawing that simultaneously folds together and expands the intimate space of the page with its spatial and performative implications. His work points to connections and ruptures between contemporary artistic practice and other forms and genealogies — in the performing arts as well as the decorative arts — which he often critically confronts with museum collections or archives in the form of experimental exhibitions that activate counter-histories in which both artist and viewer are re-positioned.
Installation view, Nick Mauss, 303 Gallery, New York, February 29 – April 11, 2020. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.
