Exhibitions

Salon Highlight: Sheila Nicolin

March 12 - May 4, 2022

Louis Buhl & Co. presents our latest Salon Highlight installment featuring a series of paintings by Sheila Nicolin. Splitting her time between New York and Detroit, Nicolin is an artist who explores the very human struggle to find intimate connection. Narrated from a naive and voyeuristic perspective, Nicolin’s paintings offer imaginative glimpses into genuine and vulnerable experiences surrounding loneliness, mental illness and desire. Referencing Existentialist, Surrealist and Erotic theory, Nicolin’s work parallels closeness and alienism, utilizing expressive mark-making, loud color and pattern to create an unreliable and sometimes dishonest story of intimacy within a space of self-despair.

The series of monochromatic paintings center around memory and the exploration of complete isolation, characterized by lone figures set within intimate, familiar spaces. The scenes that Nicolin composes are drawn from various lived moments captured in real-time; as the artist interacts with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, she documents the various experiences through photography, writing, and sketching. While the figures in her work abstractly connect to real individuals in her life, Surrealist and edited manifestations cultivate authentic yet ambiguous representations. Despite her formal training and skills in precision when it comes to painting, Nicolin actively works against the portrayal of likeness, purposefully constructing a sense of discomfort. Through the fabrication of distorted limbs, skewed depictions of space, and a dishonest use of color, Nicolin imagines a fictionalized reality in an attempt to understand human desire and the world around her.

Nicolin’s practice invariably evolves from the concept of memory; the featured body of work feels especially retrospective, as if a museum of moments frozen in time. While she was designing the paintings over the last year, connection—or, rather, lack thereof—felt more relevant than ever. Evocative of the times, the paintings draw from her own feelings of isolation that, in turn, stimulated existential thoughts about loneliness and longing. Although born out of personal and definitive occasions, the paintings are imbued with feelings that are universally relatable and timeless.

Salon Highlight: Sheila Nicolin is on view from March 12 through May 4, 2022.