Opening Reception: Sunday March 1st, 6-8pm
Regina Rex is thrilled to present a solo exhibition of work by Nancy Haynes, who has exhibited her work in New York City and abroad for nearly forty years. Pulling from a number of different bodies of work and times, anomalies and non sequiturs presents a selection of paintings, drawings, collage and sculpture—forming an open-ended constellation revealing the common thread that underlies all of Haynes’ work. As a type of “secondary consciousness” (1) that informs every successive work made by the artist, this show brings together inspirations as far ranging as Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert painting at The Frick to Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing. The cerebral, autobiographical nature of this exhibit might be described as a “remembered present.”(2)
Anomalies and non sequiturs provides a map for both the genesis of a visual language that informs the work made by Haynes today, but also a look into the elusive and multi-layered nature of the modes of consciousness that have fascinated Haynes for decades. Haynes’ recent “Fugitive Drawings” very directly present drawings of works by artists who have influenced her, lightly-drawn and layered onto canvases covered in glow-in-the-dark paint—a material she has worked with for many years. The “Fugitive Drawings” grapple with the impalpability of influence, and exemplify Haynes’ interest in the idea of an “Open Work.”(3) Also included will be paintings from The “Empty Narrative” series (mid-nineties), a group of paintings inspired by Seurat’s drawings. Taking Seurat’s cue, these paintings were made by allowing the pressure of the hand moving across the heavy linen with a wide brush to form rows of information. Like a seismograph or books on a shelf, these paintings eloquently conflate the act of looking with the act of reading with the act of painting. Other works in the exhibition include a photograph from 1994 made in response to a Vik Muniz photograph of a bookshelf, a group of collages made last summer as an homage to On Kawara, a “Pocket Painting” from the early seventies, and paintings from her “ma*” series which are paintings of the illusion of light. This illusion follows from Haynes’ understanding that - space is not other than light - light is not other than time - time is not other than impermanence - and impermanence is not other than illusion.
Nancy Haynes was born in Connecticut in 1947 and moved to New York in 1967. She lives and works in New York. An extensive exhibition history beginning in 1978 at the historically significant One Hundred Dollar Gallery and includes selected solo exhibitions at 3A Gallery, NY; George Lawson, LA and SF; Elizabeth Harris Gallery, NY; Lawing Gallery, Houston, TX; Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna; Galerie von Bartha, Basel, Switzerland; John Good Gallery, NY; and John Gibson Gallery, NY among numerous others. Nancy’s work is included in many public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and many others. Honors and awards include grants from the Pollock- Krasner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.
1, 2. Wider Than The Sky, The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness, 2004, Gerald M. Edelman
3. The Open Work, 1989, Umberto Eco
ma* - A Japanese word, here used as an experiential space understood with emphasis on interval, space, awareness of form and non-form.
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