EAST HAMPTON NY.- Pace is presenting Nursery, an exhibition of sculptures and photographs by Nina Katchadourian. This presentation marks the final show of the gallery’s third summer season in East Hampton.
The exhibition focuses on Katchadourian’s long-standing investigations of human relationships to the so-called “natural world,” which have sometimes involved interventions that she terms “uninvited collaborations with nature.” Nursery features recent sculptures from the artist’s Fake Plants project, which she began at the onset of the pandemic. In these works, Katchadourian transforms cast-off materials from her home, studio, and a nearby construction site into multifarious plant forms. Using materials such as discarded cardboard boxes, paper packaging from food products, disposable medical masks, cardboard toilet paper tubes, ping pong balls, sewing pins, Styrofoam, and toothpicks, Katchadourian creates peculiar, refined plant forms that seem to belong to unexplored or imagined landscapes.
Katchadourian’s Artificial Insemination photographs will also be showcased in the East Hampton exhibition. In Katchadourian’s Artificial Insemination works, an iconic scientific image—the moment when a sperm fertilizes an egg—is deliberately misinterpreted and restaged: Katchadourian reimagines the scene using tadpoles fished out of a pond and a chicken’s egg placed in water on a dinner plate.
Many of Katchadourian’s explorations of natural phenomena begin on Pörtö, a small island group in the southern Finnish archipelago, where she grew up spending summers with her family and still visits for extended periods each year. With Renovated Mushroom (1998), the artist used a bicycle tire patching kit from her grandfather’s tool shed on Pörtö to mend tears on the caps of mushrooms. Katchadourian’s c-print resulting from this experiment depicts a cluster of mushrooms with colorful, circular patches on their caps, humorously combining the natural and the artificial.
Nina Katchadourian is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography, and public projects.
Her video Accent Elimination was included at the 2015 Venice Biennial in the Armenian pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Group exhibitions have included shows at the Serpentine Gallery, Turner Contemporary, de Appel, Palais de Tokyo, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Turku Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, ICA Philadelphia, Brooklyn Museum, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, and MoMA PS1. A solo museum survey of her work entitled Curiouser opened at the Blanton Museum in 2017 and traveled to the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University and the BYU Museum of Art. An accompanying monograph, also entitled Curiouser, is available from Tower Books.
Katchadourian completed a commission entitled Floater Theater for the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 2016 which is now permanently on view. In 2016 Katchadourian created Dust Gathering, an audio tour on the subject of dust, for the Museum of Modern Art as part of their program “Artists Experiment”. Katchadourian’s work is in public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Morgan Library, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Margulies Collection, and Saatchi Gallery. She has won grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, Grönqvistska Foundation, and the Nancy Graves Foundation. Katchadourian lives and works in Brooklyn and Berlin and she is a Clinical Professor on the faculty of NYU Gallatin. She is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery and Pace Gallery.
