The Peder Bonnier Gallery is pleased to announce
Heads and Snails, a show of new functional sculptures and
collages by Nicola. Heads and Snails refers to the two themes
that run thrcugh the entire body of the artists new work, and that
have made recurrent appearances in her paintings, sculpture and collages
of recent years.
In treating these motifs as sculpture, Nicola pares down both the head
and the snail to archetypal simplicity while projecting them to monument
scale. With their metaphorical evocations of the duality of nature/culture,
consciousness and the subconscious, these painstakingly crafted sculptures
forge a dramatic synthesis of artistic expression and functionality.
The snail, with all its intimations of natural and cyclical order and
infinity, becomes in Nicolas hands a vessel for other animals, in
the form of a steel birdcage; or it is a source of light, as a massive
steel candelabra; or a receptacle of objects, in the form of a commode;
the head also becomes literally a container of thought as it assumes the
function of bookshelf, or of the natural world, as an aquarium. In making
these works Nicola expands on a line of exploration dating back to 1968,
when she exhibited her first functional sculpture multiplessofas
in the shape of a foot or mouth, an eye lampat the renowned Daniel
Templon gallery in Paris, and which have since become Pop Art icons.
In addition to the sculptures the artist is exhibiting a new series of
mixed-media collages based on the snail and head motifs, many of them
inspired and incorporating texts by poets. A suite of five collages employs
passages from the poem I Am A Cowboy in The Boat of Ra, by
Ishmael Reed, while in another series of ten snail collages, Nicola takes
as a point of departure the poetry of the great American satirist Dorothy
Parker.
Heads And Snails February 7,
1996
by Peder Bonnier
|