NEW YORK, NY.- Lévy Gorvy Dayan announced their representation of New York-based artist N. Dash.
The artist’s first solo exhibition with Lévy Gorvy Dayan opens on Thursday, April 25, 2024, at 35 Dover Street in London. This will be Dash’s first solo exhibition in London and the first exhibition at Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s new Mayfair gallery, located in the historic home of the Empress Club—one of the first women-only members’ clubs in London.
Born in 1980 in Miami, N. Dash received a BA from New York University in 2003 and an MFA from Columbia University, New York, in 2010. Dash’s work was the subject of solo exhibitions at SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2023–24); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Ghent (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, California (2019–20); Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2019); Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2017); and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014). The artist’s work resides in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; Dallas Museum of Art; Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain, Orléans, France; Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Ghent; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
Dash’s work harmonizes subtle energy systems by transforming humble substances through the fundamental forces of touch, attention, and care. The unconventional idiom of these paintings speaks of experience beyond language, of that which can be felt in the body but never fully articulated—of being human on this earth, entangled in its web of wildness and sublimity….
Dash’s most significant practices [include] harnessing the interaction of earth and water to create topographical fields of desiccated mud, layering commercial silk-screen technology onto non-traditional grounds, and arranging readymade manufactured objects—water bottles, agricultural netting, architectural insulation—alongside organic materials. Dash’s ‘fabric sculptures,’ fashioned by working pieces of machine-loomed cotton between fingers and thumb for long durations until the gridded threads collapse into disorderly tangles, are also present in these works as silk-screened images. To make these diminutive works, Dash slowly unfastens a manufactured product through persistent labor, creating a form that magnifies the power of human touch. These gritty, idiosyncratic totems, which evoke the realm of the preverbal transitional object, are potent emblems of entropy and energetic change….
At a time when human alienation from the environment is widespread, these works center tactility and engagement with actual earth: planes of mud are left to parch, forming cracks and tiny furrows that recall mammalian skin. These dermal fields, onto which the artist variously layers paint, silk-screen ink, or burnished graphite, reveal a microcosm of soil’s ‘matrix’—its complex structure of minerals, air, water, microbes, and organic matter. Dirt’s heterogeneous substrate is at once porous and crystalline, full of empty space and swarming with life; Dash’s paintings likewise paradoxically offer both restraint and plenitude, emptiness and complexity. The experience of viewing these works is not unlike observing the natural world: given close attention, even vistas that initially appear austere teem with vital details.
Excerpt from text accompanying N. Dash: and Water at SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2023–24)
