Even Nesbit: Porosity

EVAN NESBIT Porosity July 9 – August 7, 2015 | 11 Rivington St & 195 Chrystie St, NY

Eleven Rivington is delighted to present an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by American artist Evan Nesbit, on view at both gallery locations from July 9 through August 7, 2015. The exhibition, titled Porosity, marks the artist’s first solo show both with the gallery and in New York, and this body of work reflects the current state of Nesbit’s ongoing inquiry into how color, texture, and materials can produce a haptic and personal experience of perception.

Nesbit achieves his Porosity paintings by working from behind the picture plane, pushing vibrant acrylic paint through the pores of a burlap surface which he initially dyes, cuts, and re-sews to create a colored ground. As pixels of paint emerge on the front side of the piece, they mingle with the fabric to a mesmerizing effect. What seems from afar an inert object is in fact a vibrating image, whereby each change in our position vis-à-vis the painting yields an altogether different optic experience.

This exhibition also presents a new series of floor-to-ceiling cable sculptures. Titled Cable Paintings, these sculptures likewise provide a felt quality to their perception. Affixing objects – a ping pong paddle, plastic fruit, a microscope – to a steel wire, Nesbit creates a sculptural substrate on which he layers white paint, molding paste, and tar gel. The sculpture is itself a painted object, yet it also hides and reveals its underlying support.

Nesbit’s work is replete with links to an expansive artistic genealogy. The visually tactile paint and chromatic burlap in the Porosity series evoke ben-day dots, stained color fields, and gridded plastic compositions, while the artist’s physical process and the works’ materiality reference such movements as Arte Povera, Support/Surface, Gutai, and Dansaekhwa. Nonetheless, when viewed in person, the physicality and immediacy with which Nesbit’s pieces impinge on the eye consigns other readings. Nesbit takes us beyond seeing, viscerally activating our faculties of perception.

Evan Nesbit (b. 1985) lives and works in Grass Valley, CA. He attended the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA) and Yale University (MFA), where he received the Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Fund Prize. Nesbit has had solo exhibitions at Koki Arts (Tokyo), Ever Gold Gallery (San Francisco), and Roberts & Tilton (Los Angeles), and has been included in group exhibitions at Brand New Gallery (Milan) and Sean Kelly (New York), among others.