Perrotin has announced the representation of Nina Chanel Abney, the New York–based painter known for her high-octane compositions that fuse figuration with abstraction. Abney’s debut with the gallery opens this September in Paris, marking her first exhibition in France since her standout 2018 solo show at the Palais de Tokyo. The move feels overdue—and well-timed. Abney’s work has never shied from the entangled pressures of visibility, politics, and spectacle, and it will likely find fresh resonance in the European context.
Abney’s paintings operate at the threshold between pop immediacy and social critique. With bold color blocks, flat figures, and language that stutters across the canvas like anxious headlines, her work dramatizes our scrolling, overstimulated lives. At their best, these pieces evoke the giddy danger of being awake to everything all at once. Take Catfish (2021), for instance: a riotous jumble of masked figures, floating emojis, and racialized iconography. The image ricochets between satire and indictment, implicating the viewer in the act of decoding—or consuming—meaning.
Though grounded in contemporary life, Abney’s formal strategies reach back through time. Her flattened perspectives and clashing planes nod to Cubism, while her palette owes a clear debt to Matisse’s liberated use of color. That lineage is evident in A Moment of Reflection (2022), where the central figure seems to oscillate between prayer and protest, occupying a space both sacred and unsettled. In her hands, color becomes not just an aesthetic choice, but a charged terrain—a place where joy, violence, history, and identity converge.
According to the gallery, “Abney’s distinctively bold style harnesses the flux and simultaneity that has come to define life in the 21st century.” It’s a tidy summation, but also an understatement. Her paintings don’t merely reflect contemporary life—they replicate its disorienting velocity. Yet even amid the visual noise, there’s always a quiet intelligence at work, a choreographed logic of composition that rewards careful looking.
The Paris exhibition comes at a moment when Abney’s work feels particularly vital. Her images mirror a cultural psyche fractured by politics, celebrity, and algorithmic feed loops. But crucially, they also push against flattening interpretations. Each canvas is a puzzle that resists resolution, a refusal to play nice with expectations around narrative or moral clarity.
With this new representation—shared in collaboration with Jack Shainman Gallery and Pace Prints—Abney joins a global roster at Perrotin that increasingly favors artists who speak to both the urgencies and contradictions of now. Her Paris debut will no doubt be a visual cacophony. But it will also be, as always with Abney, an invitation to read between the lines.
