LONDON.- Modern Art is presenting a solo exhibition of works by Ron Nagle.

“It looked, to my eye, grotesque, then psychedelic, then uncomfortably erotic, and then all of those things at once. Slick, shiny surfaces glide over rough lunar terrain and neon gradients threaten to clash, but Nagle always buoys his mayhem with steady elegance” –Andrew Russeth, Art News.

For over five decades, Ron Nagle has produced intimate sculptural works. Each work is created from a variety of materials and is a careful arrangement of contrasting forms, colours, and textures that reflect a breadth of influences including the paintings and drawings of Giorgio Morandi, Philip Guston, Josef Albers, the custom cars and hot rods of the West Coast from the 1930s-50s, and Wabi-Sabi qualities of Japanese Momoyama ceramics.

Nagle began to work with ceramics while a student at high school in the 1950s, leading him to work alongside Peter Voulkos at the University of California, Berkeley. It was following this period that his own work was first shown alongside the abstract expressionist sculptures of Voulkos, as well as the work of Ken Price and John Mason, each of whom contributed to the redefinition of clay as a fine art medium unconfined to orthodox ceramics, known as the California Clay Movement.

Since his first solo exhibition in 1968, Ron Nagle’s work has been the subject of frequent solo museum exhibitions, including the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, and the San Diego Museum of Art. His work was included in the 55th Venice Biennale’s central exhibition, The Encyclopedic Palace, curated by Massimiliano Gioni in 2013.

Nagle has been a songwriter since the 1960s. He has contributed music and sound design to numerous films including Cat People and The Exorcist, as well as producing his own albums and writings songs for other artists. A deluxe edition of his acclaimed 1970 album Bad Rice was reissued in 2015 through Omnivore Recordings. His forthcoming album, Introducing the Many Moods of Ron Nagle, will be released this year.

Ron Nagle was born in San Francisco in 1939, where he continues to live and work. Amended Testimony will be his first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom.

This is Ron Nagle’s first solo exhibition with Modern Art. A new catalogue illustrating the works in this exhibition, with a foreword by Stuart Shave, will be published on the occasion.