VOLTA NY, New York
3-6 March 2011
Vane presents Nadia Hebson’s installation, ‘From Flemish Portraiture to Czech Cubist Furniture’, at VOLTA NY art fair, New York, USA.
Working in painting and installation Nadia Hebson appropriates from a diversity of seemingly unrelated sources, from Early Flemish portraiture to Czech Cubist furniture. Her low tone paintings and environments discount clear narrative readings, suggesting instead an underlying psychological intent. Employing references from a wide variety of historical sources including literature, psychoanalysis, interior design and painting, Hebson has built up an arcane, iconic vocabulary, one that gives rise to allusive, ambiguous and ultimately dysfunctional narratives manifesting themselves through highly realised figuration and ad hoc installation. Many of her works evoke a particular kind of vieux monde temperament, lending her practice a distinctive fin de siècle air and a certain romantic angst.
Hebson’s practice mostly centres on an exploration of the ongoing currency of icononic art historical imagery, where the boundaries between private symbolism and collective meaning, truth and fiction, subject and object are explored. Memory as construct is returned to again and again. Drawing on a vast bank of collected images, Hebson’s selection and translation through an often negativised painting process serves to slow down the constant parade of imagery we are subject to. As a bricolage of imagery develops – shipwreck next to portrait, next to stage set – and unexpected meanings and connections arise, the work evokes both past and present yet belongs to neither. Instead we are presented with an open-ended proposition, one subject to the vagaries and vicissitudes of the viewer’s vision that serves to remind us of the complex continuum between past, present and future.
7 West 34th Street
New York
NY 10001
USA
www.voltaartfairs.com/new-york
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