Client: Gebert Contemporary

Overview

This exhibitions features a selection of works by John Randall Nelson.

Goals

Exhibition Dates: April 2nd, 2020- June 1st, 2020
View a Virtual Exhibition @ http://whonelson.com/2018x/

Process

Nelson, as a nationally exhibited artist of over 3 decades, has a long-standing reputation for his honed development of urban-neo-folk icons.

Through the process of obliterating and burying layers of under-painting into near obscurity, Nelson transmutes his longtime lexicon of icons into a thick white noise that hums with text, collage and paint pours.

Additional Information

Both comic and menacing, smart and dumb, Nelson’s array of decorous paintings revel in materiality. The paintings are thick with poured pigment, saturated washes and worked with layers of drawing and collage. Bluntly rendered, the work is textured with ghostly pentimenti, the hint of submerged words bleeding through a milky layered ground. The intention to simultaneously “mean something” and “mean nothing at all” is the quixotic balancing act of Nelson’s work. The series includes a dozen paintings in varying scale and steel plate sculptures. All pieces are all multicolored, peculiar and charming. Upon closer inspection it becomes clear that while the works hold an aesthetic charm, they also whisper sardonically between one another.