Mindy Shapero
ZERO = INFINITY
New York | SoHo
March 14 – April 20, 2024
Nino Mier Gallery is thrilled to announce ZERO = INFINITY, an exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Mindy Shapero. The exhibition will be on view from March 14 – April 20, 2024 at our SoHo location, and marks Shapero’s fourth solo show with the gallery.
Throughout the exhibition, Shapero’s radiating abstractions pull viewers into a consciousness-warping, psychedelic realm. Gold, silver, and copper leaf adorn each vibrant acrylic painting. The compositions are structured somewhat like galaxies, with gravitational nodes bending all other forms towards them, often concentrated near the work’s center and creating target-like patterns across the surfaces. Meditating on the works from a distance prompts a cosmic transcendence, offering macroscopic views of systems that simultaneously envelop viewers.
Examining each work more closely, viewers begin to discern the negative traces of particular objects, such as keys, beads, and toys, used by Shapero as stencils. These objects lend the work an almost synesthetic quality, prompting viewers to imagine the clamor of colliding materials in the real world. But on the canvas, all we perceive are the traces of each object – shadows of discarded debris pulled into vibrant whirlwinds of color, light, and form.
Shapero’s maximalist approach, coupled with her radiating compositional structures, occasionally evokes depictions of wormholes and the big bang found in science fiction. This blend of high and low aesthetics – of gold leaf and spray paint, of sophisticated abstraction and genre fiction – serves as the foundation of Shapero’s work, a duality integral to her practice since she was immersed with punk counterculture in her teenage years and, later, worked in Mike Kelley’s studio. Now, she pairs this ethos with a discerning eye fixed on art history, with her applications of gold leaf harkening back to religious icons of the premodern era, and her fractalized facture resembling the Art Nouveau excess of Gustav Klimt’s golden phase.
The exhibition’s title, ZERO = INFINITY, suggests a cyclicality integral to both Shapero’s forms and her process. Shapero is also a sculptor, and excess materials from these works are re-used as stencils in her paintings. These objects undergo multiple cycles of spray painting and recomposition within each artwork, forming multi-layered picture planes that erase their own lineage. Shapero calls the resulting paintings Portal Scars – scars that materialize an absence of material that was once present. Zero equals infinity when voids and vacancies become dizzyingly celestial eruptions.
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.