Exhibition catalog essay, Firstlings: Sculptures + Works on Paper
October 2020, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO
By Terry Suhre
Former Director of Gallery 210 and Research Professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Arny Nadler’s recent work seeks to address the predicament of the human form’s fragility and its endless struggle to adapt to life’s ever-changing circumstances. The “predicament” Nadler refers to in statements on his work is the uneasy, existential awareness of an unsympathetic, and likely hostile, existence that is not predisposed to human wants or needs. A reality that continually tests the body’s (and the spirit’s) limitations, revealing its susceptibility to everyday suffering and humiliation.
The body’s limitations and desires have been ongoing themes in Nadler’s work for close to twenty years. These anxieties were present in Nadler’s 2001 Imperfect Adaptations/Inevitable Endings series where the artist created functionally useless rehabilitative equipment illustrating the body’s limitations and society’s failure at restoration.
Moving outside the studio Nadler expanded on this theme and addressed the duality of the human body’s limitation and dominance in the environment with large-scale and installation works such as Whelm (Gallery 210,University of Missouri-St. Louis, 2012), Gross Point Confluence (Evanston Art Center, 2010) and his imposing architectonic sculpture series Beacons (2006).
Nadler followed these works with a group, titled Infrastructure, of concrete and rebar works where aspects of the human body are suggested. Here the artist begins to step away from the modernist fetish of industrial materials to experiment with more ‘traditional’ art materials. With the shift in materials there is also a shift in form away from the formalist linear and planar structures of earlier pieces to the more biomorphic and gestural expressions.
Nadler’s experiments with clay led to the Gilt series (2013), the precursor of Firstlings. With the Gilt series the artist starts to invest in the expressive and metaphorical potential of ceramic. Titles, such as rhizus despero (root of despair) 2012, and rhizus perpessio (root of suffering) 2012, that reference emotional and psychological qualities demonstrate a conceptual change in Nadler’s work.
The earlier pieces in the Firstling series, such as the Firstling No.12, 2017 and Firstling No. 9, 2017, are suggestive of formal classical figures where the more recent grey works, such as Firstling No. 25, 2020 are more expansive, baroque and expressive. Nadler’s strategy of using neutral hues, black, white and grey, is the artists’ way of having the piece be about form rather than color to convey a sense of the object being the same substance throughout. Firstlings is the logical evolution in Nadler’s work. With this series his warping and morphing of the human form are never entirely resolved into a single reading.
With the shift of his studio practice to more traditional art materials there was an additional emphasis placed on drawing. Nadler’s drawings were, at first, a warm-up exercise, a practice not dissimilar to Surrealist automatism. As work on Firstlings progressed Nadler discovered in the ink-brush drawings a sense of motion, recognizing a relationship between the fluidity of the ink on the paper and of the plasticity of the clay. In each drawing he looks for an event, a transition, the suggestion of a kind of form, then seeks to incorporate that fluidity and dynamic into the sculptures. The drawings in the exhibition stand as separate and fully realized works created contemporaneously and in dialogue with the sculptures.
As noted above Nadler has been preoccupied with the notion of the intangibility of physical wholeness, the body, constantly in flux with a sense of uncertainty, a little broken, always incomplete but always becoming. In Firstlings his figures do not have complete agency over themselves as they become aware of their environment and struggle to evolve. Each work by Nadler stops time’s flow and provides a glimpse of living at the edge of chaos.
E-book exhibition catalog for Firstlings: Sculptures + Works on Paper