Exhibition catalog essay, Firstlings: Sculptures + Works on Paper, Bruno David Gallery, By Terry Suhre, October 2020

Arny Nadler’s recent workseeks 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 seriesthe 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  FirstlingNo.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.

Excerpt from AEQAI, Ceramics Shows at Weston Gallery, DAAP Meyers Gallery, Manifest Gallery and the Contemporary Arts Center, March 27, 2021 by Jonathan Kamholtz

Manifest’s best contribution to the NCECA world was a two-person show by Ivan Albreht and Arny Nadler. Nadler takes on what he calls “the predicament of human form.” His work is in conversation with many other representations of the body, not least Michelangelo’s fundamental vision that the body is most essentially seen when itis engaged in emerging from a shapeless medium. (It’s also possible to see Nadler’s sculptures as human forms over which tar or plaster has been poured, but the battle between the articulated and the unshaped is a vital factor either way.) Each of his pieces is displayed in the round, which is not unusual; what is unusual is that from each side, they sometimes seem like virtually different sculptures, more or less monstrous, more or less human, depending on which side we’re looking at. Nadler writes, “Many of my sculptures are formed by grafting individual parts together in a manner that nods at structural order but disregards anatomical and proportional correctness.” This results in pieces that are related to all kinds of classical models but are intensely visceral. Again from Nadler: “The resulting forms are often simultaneously heroic and absurd.” “Firstling No. 24” (2019) seems a little like a winged victory, but one that is buckling under its own weight. The surface is gritty and unpolished; it looks like a plaster sketch for a piece to be later rendered in marble. Like all figurative work in three dimensions, Nadler must work out how to support the verticality of his figures, and make those supports a part of the piece. There are strips of cloth draped over part of the support near the bottom: more bulk needed here. Though none of the pieces are particularly large, there is nothing diminutive about any of this work. “Firstling No. 17” (2019) has the most elegant surface of the three major works in the show, a kind of polished black like Wedgwood basalt ware. It seems to be a head connected to a massive torso (though perhaps wasp-waisted). A pair of randomly placed horns makes it appear to be a bull from one side, though there seem to be more human parts on the reverse. Nadler is deeply interested in the feel of anatomy but especially for the possibility of rearranging it. This is, of course, what makers do, whether divine, surrealist, or post-modern.

E-book exhibition catalog for Firstlings: Sculptures + Works on Paper