NICOLA LOPEZ AT PACE PRINTS GALLERY
Land of Illusion
April 26 – June 8
NICOLA LOPEZ AT PACE PRINTS GALLERY
Land of Illusion
April 26 – June 8
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Pace Prints is pleased to present Land
of Illusion, an exhibition of work by Nicola López, including a series of
new unique collages and editioned works. Produced at Pace Editions, Ink and Jo
Watanabe Studio in Brooklyn, NY, this is López’s third exhibition with Pace
Prints.
Land of Illusion reflects
Nicola López’s continued interest in describing place and her exploration of
our constructed landscape. Although López’s imagery is often drawn from
personal experience, the works in the show do not reference any specific time
or location. Instead, her works are an exploration of the process of creation,
permanence and ephemerality and of building, itself. López’s landscapes are in
a constant state of transformation. Just as each collaged work evolved
organically as it was built from printed elements, the imagery shows an
architectural world that is ever moving between growth and decay, teetering on
the border between fantastical possibility and dystopian vision.
The works in Land of Illusion draw on various methods of
printmaking, such as etching, relief and monotype, as well as detailed layers
of collage. In her series of reduction woodblock prints entitled The Sum of All the Parts, López uses
the medium to layer texture and color as she describes the rusting surfaces of
I-beams and the very joints of construction. These works reflect a new focus on
the details of the constructed landscape, zooming in so closely on the nuts and
bolts that hold things together that the sense of overall structure and order
is lost. This same sense of fragility and disconnection is present in Bones, a series of collaged
works that depict the internal, skeletal structures of buildings. Seen in terms
of the buildings they represent, Bones are impossibly tall. At the same time,
most of the works are roughly human-size in actual scale and can be seen as
phantoms that shift between body and architecture. Façade,, the largest work in
the show, is an impenetrable urban wall that then dissolves in certain areas to
reveal extreme fragility. Cut-out windows turn into a fine layer of lace and
the whole construction is paper thin despite the hulking weight of the layers
of imagery of buildings stacked upon buildings stacked upon buildings.
Although disconnection and alienation hover around many of the pieces in
the show, López’s work never shuts the viewer out. The possibility of human
connection is presented in the physicality of craft, the exposure of process
and the strong presence of the artist’s hand throughout.
On April 30th, a new long term site-specific installation by López
commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art will open in the recently
inaugurated Balcony Lounge. The work is titled Un-building Things.
López was born in Sante Fe, NM and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She
attended Columbia University in New York, NY, where she received her BA in 1998
and her MFA in 2004, and currently teaches at Bard College in
Annandale-On-Hudson, New York. Her work has been exhibited nationally and
internationally in cities and countries including New York, Los Angeles, Buenos
Aires, Mexico, Peru and Germany.
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NICOLA LOPEZ
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