Jamie Nares: Online

May 23 – June 22, 2024
  • On the occasion of Preoccupations: A Jamie Nares Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and NARES TRACES, Kasmin presents a selection of new works on paper by the multidisciplinary artist. Staged exclusively online, this collection expands one of Nares’ most widely celebrated bodies of work. Each amplifies a single brushstroke at grand scale, presenting undulating twists that index Nares’ swift bodily gestures.
  • Jamie Nares Untitled, 2024 oil on paper 27 x 71 inches 68.6 x 180.3 cm
    Jamie Nares
    Untitled, 2024
    oil on paper
    27 x 71 inches
    68.6 x 180.3 cm
    Inquire
  • Realized in one single sweep, Nares' brushstrokes trace a continuous movement across the paper. Exhibiting varying degrees of color saturation,...
    Nares painting a brushstroke in her studio.
    Realized in one single sweep, Nares' brushstrokes trace a continuous movement across the paper. Exhibiting varying degrees of color saturation, the works create pulsating refractions that appear three-dimensional in depth. Working flat on her studio table to minimize paint drips, Nares’ brushstrokes float in liminal space, and as curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has observed, they seem to defy gravity.

    Nares realized these works on an oil-resistant paper. The non-absorbent support encourages Nares’ oil paint, thinned with mineral spirits, to glide across its slick surface.
  • Jamie Nares Untitled, 2024 oil on paper 71 x 27 inches 180.3 x 68.6 cm
    Jamie Nares
    Untitled, 2024
    oil on paper
    71 x 27 inches
    180.3 x 68.6 cm
    Inquire

  • “The flight of the brush expresses the flight of thought” 
    —Jamie Nares

  • For over thirty years, Nares has developed her calligraphic technique to examine the limits of language. Inspired by the French...
     
    For over thirty years, Nares has developed her calligraphic technique to examine the limits of language. Inspired by the French poet and painter Henri Michaux, gestural mark making offers Nares a means of communicating the primal thoughts that words fail to capture. Each brushstroke leaves a corporeal impression on paper, revealing an underlying bond between the artist’s bodily gestures and her inner psyche.

    Using her own handmade brushes, Nares foregrounds the basic fundamentals of painting: gesture, brush, and paint. These large brushes allow Nares to capture the immediacy of a single brushstroke at monumental scale.

  • Jamie Nares Untitled, 2024 oil on paper 54 x 43 inches 137.2 x 109.2 cm
    Jamie Nares
    Untitled, 2024
    oil on paper
    54 x 43 inches
    137.2 x 109.2 cm
    Inquire
  • Jamie Nares Untitled, 2023 oil on paper 72 x 27 inches 182.9 x 68.6 cm
    Jamie Nares
    Untitled, 2023
    oil on paper
    72 x 27 inches
    182.9 x 68.6 cm
    Inquire

  • “They’re imprints of my body, transmitted through the hand or wrist, coming from my complete being, body and mind.”
    —Jamie Nares

  • Jamie Nares Untitled, 2024 oil on paper 47 x 41 inches 119.4 x 104.1 cm
    Jamie Nares
    Untitled, 2024
    oil on paper
    47 x 41 inches
    119.4 x 104.1 cm
  • Jamie Nares Untitled, 2024 oil on paper 70 7/8 x 27 inches 180 x 68.6 cm
    Jamie Nares
    Untitled, 2024
    oil on paper
    70 7/8 x 27 inches
    180 x 68.6 cm
    Inquire
  • Nares’ choice of materials enable her to swiftly erase and repeat a mark, a hallmark of the artist’s signature painting...
    Nares erasing a mark in her studio.
    Nares’ choice of materials enable her to swiftly erase and repeat a mark, a hallmark of the artist’s signature painting technique. Using a squeegee, Nares’ expunges her brushstrokes as quickly as she realizes them, only to repeat the gesture onto the same support. The result records a passage of time in a manner both attentively choreographed and grippingly spontaneous. As Nares told T Magazine in 2022, “it’s very important to the paintings that they be a transference of some accumulation of muscle memories from the body to the brush.”

  • “The paintings, too, are a record of their own becoming. They have a sense of instantaneity due to the swift nature in which the paint was committed to canvas.”
    —Marcelle Polednik, Donna and Donald Baumgartner Director of the Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Each brushstroke instantaneously documents a fluid movement, emblematic of the experimental ethos that has binded Nares’ practice in painting, film,...
    Installation view of the career-spanning retrospective Nares: Moves at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2019. Photo: John R. Glembin. Courtesy of the Milwaukee Art Museum.
    Each brushstroke instantaneously documents a fluid movement, emblematic of the experimental ethos that has binded Nares’ practice in painting, film, photography and music over the last fifty years.

    Learn more about Nares’ experimental practice on paper in NARES TRACES, on view at 297 Tenth Avenue from May 16 through June 22, 2024.

    NARES TRACES coincides with Preoccupations: A Jamie Nares Retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Presented in collaboration with the artist, this comprehensive retrospective encompasses film and video works created over five decades and will be on view from May 23 through June 2, 2024.
  • Jamie Nares Untitled, 2024 oil on paper 27 x 71 inches 68.6 x 180.3 cm
    Jamie Nares
    Untitled, 2024
    oil on paper
    27 x 71 inches
    68.6 x 180.3 cm
    Inquire

  • About the Artist

    Jamie Nares

    Jamie Nares

    Over the course of five decades, Jamie Nares has investigated, challenged, and expanded the boundaries of her multidisciplinary practice that encompasses film, music, painting, photography, and performance. She continues to employ various media to explore physicality, motion, and the unfolding of time. In the 1980s, Nares began to paint using brushes of her own manufacture, leading to her monumental brushstrokes of the 1990s onwards which appear almost three-dimensional in their detail and depth, recording a gestural passage of time and motion across the canvas.

    Learn More

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