Nick Farhi: Autumn Leaves

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Tang Contemporary Art is thrilled to present Autumn Leaves, an exploration of nostalgia and fragility through the lens of a New York-based artist Nick Farhi’s vibrant imagination.

A falling piano chord, an accordion of decommissioned pre-war sinks, still-lifes hung across the walls, a girl dancing in the rain while a Pacino-looking man adopts a puppy. This metamorphosis of subjects, contrasting weights of tropes and dim recollections of vintage New York cinema, center political fragility. The viewers are pulled through the offerings of individual stances; army green glasses versus a rainbow of stemware, a twitter-coloured bird  juxtaposes with its prey a lonely green fish.

Temporality is the constant mechanism of waking life but is bound by rich landscapes of the New York-based artist’s critical imagination. Time is precious only because it is about to break, and life moves only because there are dwelling moments of still meditation to examine it.

Film frames are constantly shuffled, sped across light at speeds to create the illusion of movement, whereas here, the oil paint moves across the canvas, outlasting captured memories.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Nick Farhi is an artist, poet, and writer. Recent group exhibitions include the Jewish Museum, New York, Nino Mier Gallery, New York, Marlborough Gallery, London, and Golsa, Oslo. Farhi has critiqued and spoken at universities and institutions including the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Columbia University School of the Arts. His writing and poetry have been published by the Yale School of Architecture’s Paprika! Magazine and the 2023 MODA Critical Review Journal of Columbia University.

Developing a wonky and uniquely a-skewed visual grammar through the labor of painting, both still and moving life, are made at deliberately bewildering and unusual scales. Through large-scale representational oil paintings, tonalities and cultural universalities within Western societies are emphasized, scrutinized and anthropomorphized.Through an interplay between visual research, (spanning from found imagery and autobiographical photography) to an internal intuition for figuration, Farhi delivers various addresses on daily life through mark-making and abstract symbologies.