 Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Press Release 2008
Rosamund Felsen Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming solo exhibition with Patrick Nickell. The exhibition will include sculpture and drawings. The sculptures are constructed of tight bands of plywood lined with cardboard and extend out from wall to floor. The lines are complex and seem to collapse and expand simultaneously and continue the artist’s investigation of how line describes volume. Complementing the sculptures are six large scale pencil on paper drawings that set out to explore line as a sense of expectation, balancing a spontaneous look with a carefully constructed lack of pictorial space. The increasing scale and complexity of his line brings an energy to the work, which makes it as much about formal space as it is a dynamic iconography of the space of our current cultural imagination.
Please join us for the artist’s reception on Saturday, September 6, 2008 from 5 – 7 pm.
Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.
For more information please contact Lucrecia Roa 310.828.8488
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at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by David Pagel of the Los Angeles Times
Patrick Nickell’s abstract sculptures resemble nothing so much as continuous lines drawn through space in the preposterous shapes of gerrymandered political districts on a map. Yet these wobbly works are so humble, understated and brave that they bring to mind the underdog.
At Rosamund Felsen Gallery, each of Nickell’s sculptures seems to have the deck stacked against it. Its materials are utterly mundane: plywood, cardboard and screws. And Nickell didn’t do anything to these hardware store supplies that an ordinary DIYer couldn’t do in his garage or basement: cut, drill, glue and paint.
Plus, the dimensions of each piece are so comically disproportionate (never more than 1 5/8 inches deep and often more than seven feet high and six feet wide) that each seems too fragile to stand on its own – much less stand up as serious sculpture, with its daunting history of monumentality and such heavyweight materials as marble, steel and bronze.
Yet Nickell has managed to make sculptures that command space. Each of his scrawny forms more than holds its own. The two galleries in which the seven pieces are installed actually feel crowded.
That’s because Nickell uses negative – or emptiness – as a medium with the same potential as any other material. Think of his fun, beat-the-odds sculptures as supersized Richard Tuttles or steroid-enhanced Fred Sandbacks.
But that’s only half the story. Nickell does not simply make new and improved Minimalist works. He also strips away the breathless reverence that surrounds these esteemed artists, bringing back some of the fun, freshness and gee-whiz fascination their work generated when it was new.
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at Luckman Gallery at Cal State L.A. by Julie Joyce
The work of Patrick Nickell emerged in Los Angeles in the form of a couple of distinctive group exhibitions in the late 1980s, and more explicitly in a solo exhibition in 1990 a the now defunct Sue Spaid Fine Art. So unassuming were the artist’s small, handmade objects – composed of cardboard and plastic glued together, touched with a hint of pencil, paint, or magic marker – that viewers who first saw the work through the front windows of the equally modest (some would say scrappy) Beverly Boulevard space might have been discouraged to enter. What at first glance may have appeared quite simple turned out to be anything but, and, in fact, utterly complex. When the viewer confronted these sculptures, the prudence of their making weighed in, at first subtly and then shockingly. For as uncommon as these works were for their idiosyncrasies, even more so were they for their sheer boldness.
What initially made Patrick Nickell’s work so exceptional was the contrast it presented to the work of the previous decade. Going directly against the scale and expense of monumental sculpture that dominated the 1980s (consider the cool, over-the-top fabrication of Jenny Holzer and Jeff Koons, for instance), and thumbing its nose at the sort of “excess” the era signified as a whole, this work was made with a do-it-yourself attitude – a paradigm of art-making that was coming to fruition in Los Angeles. The time of Nickell’s emergence also coincided with the closing of several prominent Los Angeles galleries due to economically turbulent times. Such spaces were then being replaced with shoestring operations, including Sue Spaid’s gallery as well as the infamous Dennis Anderson Gallery and Tom Soloman’s Garage in Los Angeles, and Food House in Santa Monica. Owner-run, with no staff and no expense accounts, these operations signaled a time of optimism, albeit of a very careful sort. Coming out of this sensibility, Nickell’s work seemed to propel it forth with a conviction that things had to be manageable and controllable, that all questions had to be answered or solved by the marker him or herself.
Nickell was certainly not alone in his endeavors in Los Angeles at this time. Other artists of his generation were also creating masterpieces out of castoffs and miscellaneous home-improvement hardware. Plexiglas Wonder Bread paintings by Michael Gonazlez, delicate word-related and abstract constructions by Sally Elesby, clunky and ephemeral assemblages by Tim Hawkinson, and furiously branded couches as well as film paintings by Carter Potter all found their affinities in the transformation of used, salvages, and unorthodox materials. Reworked and sometimes wrapped, fastened, and stitched, this work found its way into the lexicon and history of Los Angeles art-making. It is important to recognize the contributions made by these artists or these works, whose influence is often overlooked or at worst ignored and dismissed. Such artists owe a shared history to an influential group of pioneers including local artists Liz Larner and George Herms, and others such as Bruce Conner, Linda Benglis, Martin Puryear and Richard Tuttle, and ultimately Marcel Duchamp. Unlike the present, however, this history was never far from these artists’ minds nor was it ignored by the rigorous critical environment of the time.
One may not have noticed the Home Depot aesthetic of Patrick Nickell’s sculpture in the very beginning, because what counterbalanced these humble materials was the brilliant form of the work itself. But this aesthetic, which became so important particularly in the late 1990s, is part of what has made this work so influential to a generous number of contemporary sculptors working today in Los Angeles and elsewhere in America and Europe. The current cultural amnesia or the lack of a truly rigorous critical environment not withstanding, this work is a testament to a way of making art that is alive and well today, and one can not neglect its achievement or its influence.
Evidenced from his first exhibitions to the present, the materials Patrick Nickell uses to make his art may be simple, but the sculptures themselves are complex. Nickell understands the transformative nature of art and materials like the back of his hand. He knows that it is not just enough to put out a bunch of “stuff” and hope that it ends up being “art.” He also understands abstraction in a way few sculptors, much less painters, understand this idea today. By supplanting his earlier spur-of –the-moment, D.I.Y. aesthetic with mature sophistication in the recent work, Nickel has proved not only how skillful he is, but how cunning, as his work continues to navigate the complexities of history, metaphor, physicality, and emotion. Nickell is obviously at ease with the making part of art, and his work maintains that the matter of life can become something that in the end is quite sublime.
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at Luckman Gallery, Cal State LA by Jenni Sorkin of Frieze
For the past 15 years Patrick Nickell has been making messy, minimal sculptures from found and discarded materials such as cardboard, twine, plywood and scrap metal. In his first survey show, featuring 37 sculptural works, his creations offer up nothing more philosophical than the conundrum of ‘stuff’ – where to put it and how to transform it effectively into a range of interesting objects. What he comes up with is a body of work that is casually rigorous but insistently fussy. Poolside (1999), for instance, is a precariously balanced doodle in space, painted a bikini pink. Because of its colour and name it has a funky, if forlorn, quality, like a misshapen hula hoop left by the curb.
Abstract, whimsically inclined sculpture is nothing new. The Modernist precedent, of course, is the work of Jean Arp, Alexander Calder and Joan Miro, whose saturated colours and shapely shapes were absurd but painstaking and, although highly stylized, sometimes referenced the body. A little bit closer to home are Richard Tuttle, Liz Larner and Tim Hawkinson, whose constructions rarely, if ever connote the body. Nickell’s work is clunky-chic Pop Minimalism, but his nod to Modernism – conscious or not- is his intense focus on single-object sculptures, rather than installations or multi-part objects. Each piece, no matter how small, is a work unto itself. These days, in the age of uber-installation, that is refreshing. There are no series, no numbers and few, if any, titles – and the ones that do exist aren’t particularly witty. And there are certainly no ‘untitled’ works that add a second title in parentheses.
Rather, the focus of Nickell’s work is physical articulation. What he excels at is turning a two-dimensional scrawl into a three-dimensional scrawl into a three-dimensional sculpture. A cascade of circles, tangled squiggles, rough-hewn flowers and a large yellow asterisk all resemble a sort of absentminded doodle. Making marginal shapes from marginal materials, he conveys the integrity of building. There is something very architectural about his pursuit, assembling bits of detritus to form something solid and lasting. Like Tom Friedman or Thomas Hirschhorn, Nickell enthusiastically brandishes ugly materials, but has a greater concern for beauty than wit. Admittedly there is a ‘boy art’ quality to the work – gruff, unassuming, semiliterate. Most of Nickell’s work was produced during the 1990s, a decade when the body was the subject of intense scrutiny and representation. At that time there was a great tendency for sculptors to focus their materiality in the direction of the bodily, often through obvious means: hair, wax, bits of cloth or other soft, porous materials. Not Nickell. His works may be quirky, but they are decisively formal, choosing clean idiosyncratic lines any day over fleshy curvaceousness. Affably scruffy, perhaps Nickell’s work is so compelling because it is insistently, even obstinately, elegant. This is seen in his adept us of light – creating cut-outs, porous plastic and open spaces through which light will pass to create evocative shadows on the walls behind and beneath the works. Shadows add a dramatic flair that insists on his sculpture as more severe than comic. Were Nickell’s materials not so humble, his sculptures might be pretentious. Instead, they are gracefully, gloriously mundane.
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at Luckman Gallery, Cal State LA by Christopher Miles of Artforum
Occasionally, an exhibition at a smaller LA venue suggests the bigger ones might be getting sleepy at the wheel. This season – marked by such misuse of space as the too-close-to-corporate J. Mays car show at LA MOCA and LACMA’s Edmier/Fawcett Pygmalion-fest – was ultimately made memorable when Cal State’s underrecognized university gallery mounted a long overdue first survey of works by local artist Patrick Nickell. Like wallflowers, these pieces never flaunt themselves but are well worth getting to know.
“Built for Speed” shared its title with Nickell’s first solo show, in 1990, a the now-defunct Sue Spaid Gallery. The title’s reuse reflects the artist’s ability to breathe new life into castoffs, and the phrase itself notes his penchant for soapbox derby technology and lemonade-stand production budgets. Already glimmering with his oeuvre’s core values are untitled works made between 1991 and 1994 in which rings and other shapes bent out of corrugated cardboard are wrapped in clear plastic, creating units of homemade dazzle. Operating by a logic in which structural and aesthetic functions go hand and hand, Nickell clusters them into formations resembling necklaces, chandeliers, bouquets, and windows of leaded glass, harnessing his materials’ translucency, malleability, reflectivity, rigidity, and tensile strength.
While Nickell’s building blocks rarely get more highfalutin then cardboard, hot glue, and scrap lumber, no works are born of glib intent to insert materials presumed low in an arena alleged lofty. Among Nickell’s mostly untitled works are objects resembling an asterisk, a movie projector, kitchen implements, and a disembodied clown’s mouth on a pedestal; all toy with assorted attitudinal bents, from a flair for the baroque to a tendency toward prudence, from deadpan funny to deeply serious.
Since 1999, Nickell’s work has become more precise, and perhaps more formulaic, with his now-familiar cardboard-and-plastic facets tiled together into architectural model-like structures. But as much as Nickell likes to recycle, he also knows when to throw the formula. The show’s newest work, an untitled sculpture of cutout plywood and cardboard from 2003, could be the outline of a thought bubble or a country, lifted from the page, enlarged, emptied, turned on its side, and painted pink. Leaning against the wall, it flirtatiously awaits an inscription from its viewer. Like nearly all his works, the latest defines itself by packaging empty space: a clever way of making sculpture and a potent clue to Nickell’s interests. Taking evident physical and intellectual pleasure in discovering what can be gained or extracted through play, he turns his common materials into value-added items – containers that shyly but persuasively ask you to lend them your thoughts for a while.
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at Luckman Gallery, Cal State LA., by Peter Frank of LA Weekly
A this midcareer retrospective shows, local sculptor Patrick Nickell demonstrates an eccentric sensibility and a virtuosic way with materials, resulting in a body of three-dimensional constructions that take off, incorporate, pun on, and thoroughly distort the shapes and objects of ordinary life. In his almost magical ability to conjure never-before-seen shapes out of the most mundane sources, Nickell brings Richard Tuttle to mind. But there is little of Tuttle’s Zen introversion in Nickell’s expansive brand of bricoleur poetry – laconic compositional simplicity, yes, straightforward use of disparate (and usually junky) material, yes, but not Tuttle’s near-muteness or sub-atomic sense of scale. Nickell’s early work, in fact runs quite big and displays a quasi-architectural “builtness”; the several works from a decade and a half back that Nickell has recently modified and finished are breathtaking in their raw, wit-leavened elegance. The sculptures from the past decade, by contrast, are engagingly, hilariously fussy and very sexy besides, like jewelry on acid and steroids, turning corners, physically and intellectually, just when you least expect. As a fashioner of improbable things, Nickell harks back not just to Tuttle, but to H.C. Westermann and Mark di Suvero – in other words, to a persistent line in American sculpture that honors tinkering and do-it-yourself-ing to realize a rough-and-tumble, but also coy and wacky, veracity.
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