Nicola Lopez | Neither There nor Here
July 13 - August 27, 2022
Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present a multimedia exhibition by New York artist Nicola López. The show features several bodies of work including a series of graphite drawings, wall-sized works on paper, cyanotypes, and an immersive 4-channel video room installation.
López’s interdisciplinary practice includes printmaking, drawing, collage, installation and videos of reimagined worlds that combine landscape and architecture. Her gorgeously disorienting visual paradoxes continue to elicit new ways of looking at urban and natural environments. Neither There nor Here thematically explores “place” and the ways humans construct ideas about the spaces we inhabit. López’s longtime printmaking practice is evident throughout the exhibition and highlights her dynamic use of image seriality, layering, and variability in each medium.
In the stop-motion video projections of cityscapes, Searching for Here, López layers hand-drawn shapes onto aerial views of streets and buildings. Multiplying structures morph like living creatures activated by shapes and colors that reiterate the hand of the artist and the present moment.
Massive LandForm drawings stand ten feet tall, made through a graphite rubbing technique that transfers an image from a surface below the paper. López’s spontaneous, improvised forms are intended to look both familiar and implausible; a poetic conflation of geology and architecture.
López’s recent series of cyanotypes are created through a light-sensitive photographic process. The artist collected plants, flowers, and rocks (in the desert landscape where she grew up in New Mexico) and added stenciled geometric cut-outs to create hybrid nature/city silhouettes that appear to glow inside an electric blue palette.
Through her work in installation, drawing and printmaking, Nicola López describes and reconfigures our contemporary, primarily urban, landscape. Her focus on describing ‘place’ stems from an interest in urban planning, architecture and anthropology and it has been fueled by time spent working and traveling in different landscapes. López was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, 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).
