NYC Art Shows- Nathalia Edenmont at Nancy Hoffman

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture
Mar 202025
 

For Nathalia Edenmont‘s exhibition Out of Body at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, she explores the symbolism of the egg through photography and sculpture.

From the gallery-

While she is known for her portraits of women wearing dresses she composes of flowers or fruits and vegetables, as well as for her collages of butterfly wings that she magnifies into monumental photographic compositions, she was ready to take a leap into unknown territory inspired by her personal connection to the beguiling goose eggs.

In 2012 the artist acquired a collection of unfertilized goose eggs. When Edenmont was told she was infertile and incapable of bearing a child, she rediscovered these beautiful objects, and realized they were a metaphor for her life, and that she could transform them, turning them into evocative, mysterious sculptural forms she could photograph as subject and object. Mostly white against a stark black background, the eggs are also black, and turquoise and red, each having a character of its own. Her magnum opus sculpture, Out of a Fertile Summer Sun, is an egg within an egg, the larger egg cracked open to reveal a smaller one, bringing to mind images of the Madonna and child throughout art history.

Jean Wainwright writes about Edenmont’s eggs:

“Edenmont’s eggs are different, they are deeply imbued with her feminine experiences, of being a woman unable to bring to life a child and it is in the process of her ‘cracking’ that we unravel the significance of these haunting photographs. Having rediscovered her shells she stored, she set to work to find a new way of engaging with her own life force, bringing new life and creative energy to the empty shells. Now colour is drained from her photographs and the process of working with fragility and delicacy lies in the power of Edenmont’s hand. She moves her fingers and palm around the white goose egg shells in a circular motion as one might caress a womb carrying a child, but then she presses with her fingers and thumb in order to crack the shell exerting different pressures to create the different depths and (amounts of) cracks. Her working method is totally immersive, intense, and time-consuming using trial and error. Many of the experiments do not work; the formation of the cracks and the fault lines in the shells not aesthetically pleasing. Nonetheless, she persevered trying again and again – tapping and pressing the shells, retaining just a previous few to photograph and losing around two hundred egg shells in the process. Each haunting photograph of the egg shell seems suspended in an infinite black universe, a potent evocation of life and loss.”

Edenmont was born in Yalta, and moved to Sweden by the time she was 20, realizing that life in the Soviet Union was disintegrating and held no future for her. Sweden was a country to which she could easily get a visa, being alone in the world after the age of 14, when both her parents died and she had no other relatives. At 27, she was accepted to Forsberg Skola, to study graphic design, where an artist mentor encouraged her to visualize her inner pictures and try to capture them with the camera. It is thanks to Per Hüttner that Nathalia is the photo-based artist she is today.

All of her work derives from her life experience. She says: “I only look inside my head. What I see in my mind is what I create. I do not sketch; the image is complete and sharp within me. I have absolute control over all aspects of what I do.” She uses a large format Sinar camera with 8×10 film and many lenses.

This exhibition closes 3/22/25.

Purdy Eaton at Nancy Hoffman Gallery New York

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Mar 132020
 

 

Currently at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York is Purdy Eaton’s delightful painting exhibition Eat and Live. Eat and Die.

From the press release-

Eaton’s upcoming exhibition is a nod to Bruce Nauman’s One Hundred Live and Die. Eat and Live, Eat and Die; the essence of all life: plants, animals, humans, kings, queens, and cockroaches are all bound to this ethos. This, like Nauman’s other phrases, Feel and Live, Feel and Die, is simultaneously fatalistic and equalizing.  The chaos of politics, climate volatility, and random violence is rightfully fear inducing and overwhelming, yet there is something hopeful and meditative about the reality you eat you live, you eat you die.  There will always be a tomorrow no matter how dystopic.

Eaton’s darkly humorous oil paintings riff on this dichotomy. As climate change and divisive politics tear at our foundations, we are placated by funny cat videos and TikTok memes. Play and Live, Play and Die. We can see the big picture, but sometimes it is just too depressing and overwhelming, and we want to enjoy that gorgeous sunset even if it is made of toxins.

In a series about state birds, Eaton examines the warped reality that many of the state birds are no longer able to inhabit the states they were legislated to represent. The California quail, California’s state bird for nearly a century, is leaving the state as their range is becoming too warm for them to stay. In Eaton’s depiction, the quail appear in front of a lovely sunset, but on further inspection, they might actually be escaping the latest wildfire. In another painting, Paul Bunyan rises in the foreground, while an American loon flies in another direction. The juxtaposition of this iconic strongman roadside attraction—symbolic of the American celebration of “man taming the wilderness”—-with a bird that can no longer live in Minnesota, hints that it might be time to reexamine our origin stories. In another painting from the series, a Northern Flicker with bright yellow plumage rises from a background of rockets in Huntsville, Alabama. As the location of early launches, these relics of NASA’s glory years are now tourist attractions. Space is no longer the purview of science and human progress—it has become the escape hatch, the place to go when we need a Plan B.

Eaton also spins Nauman’s duality to remind us that despite the apocalyptic visions we read about daily, it is not all bad for all creatures. Fireflies, for instance, are flourishing. The Canada Goose, once on the verge of extinction, has become so common as to be a nuisance. With these color-rich and storied paintings, Eaton is asking us to realize that this is our moment to be alive, before we all die, and that the flowers are indeed quite beautiful.

This exhibition closes 3/14/20.