BELLEVUE, WA.- Bellevue Arts Museum is presenting—for the first time in the Northwest—the art of Chicago-based painter Nicole Gordon. Altered States, which opened at BAM on January 24, 2020, demonstrating the breadth of Gordon’s surrealist vision through large-scale paintings, sculpture, and installations.

The exhibition presents a suite of new paintings by Gordon. A painter of hallucinatory lucidity and skill, Gordon’s large-scale canvases meticulously depict a liquid dreamscape of all-too-solid fantasy. Drawn from post-surrealist archetypal images of wood-paneled rooms, pensive children, deserted carnival rides, or empty urban landscapes, her compositions are then seemingly run through super-saturated sci-fi, skate-punk, and psychedelic filters.

Altered States also features sculptures and installations created by Gordon, inspired by selected past works. Pulling imagery directly from her paintings, these installations invite viewers to experience her two-dimensional works in entirely new ways.

Gordon’s versions of our reality are continuously fluid—past, present, and post-human future intermingling with a primal and pre-conscious state. In surrendering to the luxury of these images, we are invited to take a new look at the universally accepted conventions that underpin our reality, and wonder, not for the first time, whether the greatest artists need not paint what is real, but only what is true.

Nicole Gordon (b. 1976) studied at the Lorenzo de’ Medici University in Florence, Italy and received her BFA from the University of Michigan. Her richly colored, hyperreal canvases explore the tension that exists between the artificial and the real. Thematically, the surrender to the loss of personal space is a recurring subject of her work, which she depicts through her unforgettable style and phenomenal craftsmanship. Gordon is represented by the Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles, CA.