Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to announce Tiradero, a series of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Mindy Shapero for Frieze Los Angeles 2022. The fair’s VIP Preview will run from February 17-18 and will open February 19-20 to the public.
Shapero’s oeuvre marks a prolonged investigation of the relationship between painting and sculpture, accented by a proclivity towards psychedelic abstraction. The works on linen for Frieze Los Angeles develop a practice the artist has taken up in recent years, wherein fragments of past sculptural work and other found items are used as stencils upon which Shapero creates multi-layered picture planes.
Punk, grunge, and kitsch are important visual and affective vocabularies for Shapero, as she takes forgotten or discarded items as the bedrock of her compositions. Byproducts of past sculptures such as broken toys, bottle lids, and junk jewelry work in tandem with wall relief portals—another facet of the artist’s practice— to form intricate webs of stencils. The artist then spray paints the linen, resulting in pockets of negative space where there once lay three dimensional objects. These objects are spray painted and re-composed many times throughout the work’s surface, resulting in a final image that blurs the linear progression of its making. Once she is done with her stencils, the objects are yet again repurposed as materials for new sculptures. In this way, beginning and end collapse in on each other in Shapero's process marked by cyclicality, and in her powerful surfaces marked by the flourishing of color, line, and pattern.
The works for Frieze are titled after the Spanish word tiradero, which connotes phrases in English like “big mess,” “garbage dump,” “junk thrown by a toddler in a fit,” and other such instances of materialized chaos. The clutter and energy of the phrase is also suggestive of the experience approaching Shapero’s works, which transform from beautifully composed radiations of spray paint and silver and gold leaf into rich landscapes of patterning, ever increasing in detail.
Mindy Shapero (b. 1974 in Louisville, KY; lives and works in Los Angeles) earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. Shapero’s work has been shown extensively in institutions across the United States in exhibitions organized by Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KY; the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH.
