303 Gallery is pleased to present the work of Nick Mauss in 2016’s ADAA: The Art Show.
On this occasion, Mauss will present three reverse-glass-painted mirror murals, a large fabric wall drawing, works on paper, and ceramic plaques. Mauss’ mirror murals consist of sheets of glass painted backwards, mirrored, and spattered with acid, creating humming layers of visual interference between the act of looking and one's own reflection entangled in the image.
The largest wall of the booth is stretched in fabric drawn and painted on by the artist. This giant fabric, stitched together by vertical seams, also traffics in planes of interruption. Deliberately truncating rendered forms so that they break and reassemble into other areas of the tapestry, this purposeful subjugation of a complete legibility lends the work a temporal dimension, as images coalesce on an experiential stratum. Ceramic plaques and drawings hung on this ground echo motifs drawn onto the fabric itself, expressive graphic elements hovering and settling into a permanent mutability. One of Mauss’ large mirror murals is installed at an angle against this fabric wall, bringing it into oblique visual contact with the other murals, as well as stretching space and visual signals in unexpected ways.
Mauss’ work at The Art Show presupposes a litany of simultaneous perception, the futility of demarcation from one instant to the next. A tracing and a retracing that never completely unites, the viewer is forced to embrace the impossibility of finding an observational tabula rasa, of succumbing to concurrence.
Nick Mauss has exhibited internationally, including recent solo presentations at 303 Gallery, New York (2015); Art Basel Unlimited, Basel (2014); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2014); Fiorucci Art Trust, London (2014); Kim?, Riga (2012) and Indipendenza Studio, Rome (2012). Mauss staged the performance “1NVERS1ONS” as part of the 2015 edition of Frieze Projects, London working with the Northern Ballet and the National Youth Ballet, and featuring performances by Kim Gordon and Juliana Huxtable. Mauss was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2012 and Greater New York, MoMA PS1 in 2010, and has participated in group exhibitions at S.M.A.K. Gent, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Kunsthaus Bregenz; The Walker Art Center; Kunsthalle Basel; and Kunsthalle Zurich. Born 1980 in New York, he currently lives and works in New York and Berlin.