Nicola López | Hybrids
July 17 - August 31, 2019
Opening Reception: July 17, 6 - 8 pm
First Thursday Reception: August 1, 2019, 6:00 - 8:00 pm
New York artist Nicola López reconfigures contemporary urban landscapes through her installation, drawing and printmaking practice. In the new exhibition, Hybrids, López explores visual entanglements of natural and constructed environments through works on paper made from 2017 to 2019. Her imaginative imagery explores how nature changes through human intervention and is comprised of new drawings and recent etchings, lithographs and collages on mylar made during printmaking residencies at Tamarind Institute (Albuquerque, NM) and LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies (New York).
López has employed printmaking techniques throughout her practice, as she is drawn to new visual possibilities, experimentation and building imagery through a slowed down or methodical process. In a recent series of etchings titled Sunsets and Blue Skies, López flattens perspectives and creates disorienting configurations of tree/billboard transmutations. Velvety black silhouettes of tree branch armatures contained within linear gridded enclosures reach outward amid a backdrop of radiant but ominous, clouded portals.
In the series Parasites, Prosthetics, Parallels and Partners, elaborate scaffolding and armatures interact with tree trunks and branches, proposing various relationships between nature and our human-built world. López’s compelling constructions possess an anthropomorphic tenderness and simultaneous absurdity, seemingly questioning humankind’s restorative entanglements.
Nicola López was born in Santa Fe, NM and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her undergraduate degree and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and other residencies. In 2011, López was invited to build an installation in the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. López’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), the Museo Rufino (Tamayo, Mexico City) and the Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO).