Nature Morte, 1982–1988

Ehrlich Steinberg is pleased to present Nature Morte, 1982–1988, the first survey exhibition dedicated to the influential East Village gallery Nature Morte, founded by artists Alan Belcher and Peter Nagy, active from 1982 to 1988. The exhibition features early works, some unseen in decades, both originally shown at Nature Morte or created during its six-year run. Nature Morte, 1982–1988 includes represented artists Gretchen Bender, Jennifer Bolande, Kevin Larmon, Ken Lum, Richard Milani, Joseph Nechvatal, Joel Otterson, Steven Parrino, David Robbins, Not Vital, and Julia Wachtel, as well as exhibited artists Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum and Laurie Simmons, and Richard Pettibone. The exhibition also features works by Belcher and Nagy, at the time represented by Cable Gallery and International with Monument, respectively.

Between 1982 and 1988, Nature Morte introduced a generation of artists whose practices resisted the dominant Neo-Expressionist painting then saturating New York’s hyped Downtown scene. Eschewing gestural, subjective, and emotionally charged aesthetics, these artists turned toward strategies of appropriation, photographic intervention, and a wry form of neo-conceptualism. Strongly influenced by the earlier example of Metro Pictures, Belcher and Nagy’s gallery sharply articulated contemporary art’s deepening entanglement within mass media, graphic design, and the logic of commercial display. Together, the exhibiting artists embraced a critical inhabitation of the structures of publicity, distribution, and reception, treating the languages of advertising, image-culture, and institutional framing as both subject matter and material.

 

The exhibition is accompanied by “Once More, With Feeling”, a newly commissioned text by Blake Oetting.

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Jan Tumlir review, Artforum.