Nino Mier Gallery is thrilled to announce Celeste Dupuy-Spencer and Nicola Tyson’s inclusion in Women Painting Women, curated by Andrea Karnes and on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth from May 15 – September 25, 2022.
The thematic exhibition features 46 leading artists who find “new ways to activate and elaborate on the portrayal of women” in painting. Karnes has focused the show on work made after 1960, and has included artists such as Alice Neel, Lorna Simpson, Marlene Dumas, Nicole Eisenman, and Mickalene Thomas alongside Celeste Dupuy-Spencer and Nicola Tyson. “Replete with complexities, realness, abjection, beauty, complications, everydayness, and joy, the portraits in this exhibition make way for female artists to share the stage with their male counterparts in defining the [images] of women and how [they have] evolved.”
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer moves between styles, gestures, and genres of painting to interrogate how various structures of power such as patriarchy inform the American experience. Through seemingly fast brushwork and a montage of visual language, Dupuy-Spencer imbues each painting with a sense of existential grappling—figures and scenes are at once terror-filled yet full of tenderness. Communities and societies are depicted in all their contradictions and repressions—but also in their displays of solidarity, hope and love, as figures coalesce in domestic spaces, churches, and on neighborhood streets. The artist captures these deeply layered, microcosmic narratives that speak to the ever-evolving nature of America. Dupuy-Spencer has recently exhibited at the Ogden Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; GRIMM Gallery, Amesterdam, NL; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles; and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, DE, among others.
For over three decades, Nicola Tyson’s influential explorations of embodiment and the female form have spanned not just painting, but also sculpture, drawing, and the written word. The artist distorts our experiences of identity and the structures which determine them—gender, sexuality, and (non-)humanity. Her biomorphic figures and painterly surfaces rattle our expectations of what bodies are, what they can do, and how they should be represented. Tyson has had numerous solo shows, including at Sadie Coles HQ, London; Petzel Gallery, New York; the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Mutual Admiration Society, Chicago; the Cleveland Institute of Art; and Vielmetter, Los Angeles; among others.