303 Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new work by Nick Mauss. Over the past year, Mauss has been working with new techniques and processes in ceramic that extend his decade-long collaboration with Bottega Gatti in Faenza, Italy. In 2018, while working there on a series of murals for the I.M. Pei-designed Chemical Engineering building at MIT (Dispersed Events), Mauss began planning an extended stay during which he could experiment without any specific framework. The materials of ceramic—clay, glaze and firing—require patience, improvisation and care, and Mauss takes the periods of delay intrinsic to these processes (days, weeks, sometimes months) as a way of re-thinking the temporality of techniques of drawing and making textiles as he slides them into ceramic (these techniques include: sgraffito, wax-resist, stenciling, underglaze as underdrawing, and marbling clay bodies together). Mauss stresses materials to do things at the limit of their capacity, and sometimes a shift between intention and result catalyzes a rethinking of everything. The final works hold the quality of both changeability and repair, crystalizing contradictory tensions and flashes of lucidity—a thinking as form in our present world.
Nick Mauss' most recent exhibitions includes Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc. at Kunsthalle Basel (2020). His work was recently included in the encyclopedic survey of ceramics, Les Flammes: L’Âge de la céramique, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2021), and is currently on view within Christian Bérard: Eccentrique Bébé at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.