Artist: Fay Nicolson
Exhibition title: UN MAKE ME
Curated by: Domenico de Chirico
Venue: Rolando Anselmi, Berlin, Germany
Date: April 30 – June 15, 2016
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Rolando Anselmi, Berlin
Galerie Rolando Anselmi is pleased to present ‘UN MAKE ME’ a solo show by British artist Fay Nicolson, curated by Domenico de Chirico.
Where the nine hundreds can be considered as the avant-garde century, the age-old motif of the mutual influence and interference between word and image on the one hand and figurative arts and literature on the other gains a new speci fic setup precisely with avant-gardist culture.
That is also the topic behind the so-called ut pictura poesis, the Latin expression by the Roman poet Quinto Orazio Flacco which literally translates to: “as in painting so in poetry”— an across all disciplines-approach defined and advocated for centuries by artists and eloquence virtuosos.
Since the end of the 19th century, images have been manifesting a renewed radical independence and an unbidden value while their translatability into words has become an all-together more complex process. Images— as visual representations of reality in non-solid form— have, since then, made apparent an awareness that exceeded the boundaries of the real while fiddling with new peculiar, metaphysical and musical dimensions erring towards the unmistakably metaphorical.
The avant-garde movements’ strategy has been active precisely in the direction of the elaboration of new aesthetic languages capable of isolating and articulating that metaphorical angle. The latter being the common foundation of both the pictorial image and of the written word—in the framework of literature—it becomes the starting ground to grasp and analyse differences and interrelations between the two languages. All the while maintaining an overarching interest in celebrating beauty as a pure form in an ideology redolent of the statements of art historian Bernard Berenson—who advocated the passage “from the observation of forms to that of a form”. A mise-en-scène of images takes place through a new language whose structure is made up of cultural and emotional strati fications in a succession of linguistic and pictorial images, where the latter lose their original/residual formal speci ficity.
Fay Nicolson theorizes a new formal code of Ars Poetica according to which, in an accurate yet totally personal way, “poetry is like a painting” or “a painting is like a piece of poetry”—with a firm focus on revealing the special nature of the pictorial sign.
For ‘UN MAKE ME’ Nicolson has produced a series of large-scale works spanning from and around the idea of a making, moving, viewing and sensing body. In this exhibition Nicolson addresses Image as if it were a person, a living thing possessing a drive and consciousness of its own.
Fay Nicolson makes prints, paintings, objects and performances that explore learning through doing—tacit and explicit knowledge and tensions between image, surface and perception. Her works incorporate a set of visual motifs including: rippled surfaces; patterned fabrics; limbs; marks; type and gestures. Her compositions sit between the intuitive, fluid and painterly on the one hand and the choreographed, mediated and digital on the other.
Fay Nicolson graduated from the Royal College of Art (2011) and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (2006). Recent Solo exhibitions include: OVER AND OVER PURE FORM, Grand Union, Birmingham UK, (2015); PLAY SENSE, Gerald Moore Gallery, London, UK, (2015); A P E L, Almanac Projects, London, UK (2013); P A R E, West Lane South, London, UK (2013); WORK WITH MATERIAL, Kunsterhaus Vienna, AU, 2013. Recent selected group exhibitions include: Basic Structures of, Austrian Cultural Forum, London, UK; FACE TO FACE: A Selection of International Emerging Artists from the Ernesto Esposito Collection, Palazzo Fruscione, Salerno, IT (both 2016); A Natural Syntax for Rhythmic Forms and Semiotic Variations, BID Project, Milan, IT; Madrugada: Louisa Gagliardi, Fay Nicolson, Tomorrow Gallery, NY, USA; Jacopo Miliani, Fay Nicolson, Jackson Sprague, Frutta, Rome, IT; Elapse / End, MAISTERRAVALBUENA, Madrid, ES; As it seems, COSAR HMT, Dusseldorf, DE; Palourde Cuites, Christopher Crescent, Brussels, BE; Exquisite Collapse, blip blip blip, Leeds, UK;The Decorator and the Thief (…), NGCA & Priestman Gallery, Sunderland, UK (all 2015); ACCORDION, Laura Bartlett Gallery, London, UK; before breakfast we talked about the furthest visible point before it all disappeared, Tenderpixel, London, UK;Textile Languages, Thalie Art Project, Brussels, BE (all 2014); Open Cube, Mason’s Yard White Cube, London, UK (2013).
