Exhibition

Sara Nickleson
The Fourth Way
Sept. 23, 2023 - Nov. 8, 2023

Featured Artwork

Louis Buhl & Co. is pleased to present a new exhibition with Detroit-based artist Sara Nickleson, titled The Fourth Way and opening Saturday, September 23rd, 2023. In search of a departure from prevailing ideas around figuration, Nickleson imagines the body as impermanent, morphing and changing as a representation of complex human emotion and cognition. The show will showcase six new paintings, including one at the largest scale the artist has worked within to date.

Rooted in her own longtime battle with depression—and significant reprieve through psychedelic therapy—Nickleson finds solace in world-building that draws from her studies in consciousness and melancholia, as well as theories around ‘deep adaptation’ in the face of climate crisis. “‘Deep adaptation’ refers to the personal and collective changes that might help us to prepare for (and live with) a climate-influenced breakdown or collapse of our societies. In the paintings, I imagine a world post climate catastrophe, presenting a recovering planet and beings that have evolved with more affective and cognitive capacity than us, with a deep connection to the planet,” the artist explains. Notably, these painterly visions lack the presence of modern infrastructure entirely, reflecting on the failed promises of modernity and contemplating a future in which the object world has been emptied of significance. Although channeling the metaphysical, Nickleson’s scenes reference reality in their allusion to our own seeming acceptance of global warming and its active implications. Broadly, Nickleson’s figures are difficult to decipher in their abnormality, however, their expressions are neutral and their dispositions calm. Although the world is burning down before their eyes, the attuned beings feel at home in this strange, chaotic habitat. Artificial colors—hot pinks, rich blues, neon oranges—are beautiful and enticing to the eye in their material nature, yet, in contrast symbolize effects of toxicity in a poignant commentary on the prevalence of such synthetic hues in our own environment due to an increased frequency of extreme weather events. 

Nickleson begins each painting by amassing a multitude of disparate elements to create her imagery through digital collage, a process she feels is representative of a human condition that is awkward, expansive, and fragmented. The individual’s evolution and impermanence is significant and drastic—cognitively, physically and emotionally; this concept inspires the abstract builds of Nickleson’s figures, many of which appear to live in a perpetual state of metamorphosis. Her approach finds inspiration in Surrealism’s psychological underpinnings, aiding her abandonment of traditional representations of the human form. In 1925 in Paris, pioneering surrealists Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp invented cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse)—a collaborative drawing approach used to create bizarre and intuitive drawings—in search of a superior reality believed to be accessible through tapping into the unconscious psyche. The exquisite corpse method informs the way in which Nickleson layers and arranges images to create compositions that could not be imagined under ordinary circumstances with the woke, disciplined mind. In doing so, she works to establish the idea that one’s spirit is paramount to one’s physicality. 

In The Three Witches, for example, it is difficult to distinguish whether the androgynous subject is one figure or multiple. The painting’s title refers to the antiquated moniker for Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Kati Horna, three important female surrealist artists whose creative contributions, though widely recognized today, were historically overlooked amidst a movement misogynistic in its roots. Interested in the research of her predecessors, Nickleson cites the teachings of G.I Gurdjieff to be influential, particularly his belief that artists had the ability to create works that could communicate a realm of consciousness that transcends our everyday reality. Embracing this framework to drive her creative ambitions, Nickleson’s work serves as an agent in building her own understanding of self as well as a point of hope in navigating the somber realities of the modern world.

Sara Nickleson: The Fourth Way is on view from September 23 through November 8, 2023 at Louis Buhl & Co.

Paintings

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