Artist: Nick Mauss
Venue: Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens, Greece
Date: September 25 – November 28, 2015
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
Eleni Koroneou Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Nick Mauss at the gallery. The artist will be present during the opening reception, Friday September 25, 2015, 8-10p.m.
Nick Mauss’ diverse artistic practice encompasses drawing, sculpture and performance along with some curatorial projects that he initiated in the last years. Mauss’ oeuvre is characterised by a perpetual state of indeterminacy, in a need of thinking about drawing and painting in an expansive sense. His work is a premeditated confusion where definitive shapes and forms are overlooked in favour of ambiguous semblances, while the use of various media and the titles of his work further add to the transient, ephemeral and contingent nature of the works.
For this exhibition, Mauss created a new body of work, consisting of drawings on fabric that are mounted on aluminum. The fabric is either used as a support for his charcoal/ink/pastel drawings or in other cases the fabric support itself is collaged, so that the drawing and the coloring seem to come apart, like a mis-aligned print. Taking into account the distinct materiality of fabric and its ability of absorbing as well the paint as the light – in a different way than for example paper – it creates a smooth surface for the drawing to be revealed. Also on view are some prints from smoked glass negatives made by an early photographic technique called cliché verre, where every line or mark, including incidental marks, registers on the final print as an accumulation. In addition to that Mauss intervened in the gallery space by creating some free-standing model-like works out of paper, drawings and photographs, that function sculpturally, caught between being hung and being left behind. Mauss encourages the viewer to approach his artworks through an individual visualisation and input by drawing personal paths and filling in the illusory blank spaces of the gallery.
Nick Mauss, Divider, 2015
Nick Mauss, Rauschen, 2015
Nick Mauss, Redo, 2015
Nick Mauss, This year, 2015