petzel gallery

The most comprehensive overview of the artist’s paintings to date, Nicola Tyson: Selected Paintings 1993-2022provides a thorough investigation of the artist’s evolving lexicon.

＂Tyson’s paintings do not mirror the world that we see with our eyes. Rather, they invoke a kind of dreamscape; the forms are familiar, we understand them, but we cannot quite place how we know them, or where we saw them, or why we are seeing them again now.＂ -Kathy Noble, Artforum

Known primarily as a painter, Nicola Tyson adds psychological weight to eroticized flesh. She enlivens her canvases with a motley of biomorphic creatures, amalgamated from partly recognizable coordinates of corporeal and animalistic appendages. Her enigmatic mutations, borne out of what she calls ＂psycho-figuration,＂ explore the possibilities unlatched by a bodily orientation to painting, informed as much by identity, gender and sexuality as by recesses of the unconscious. The paintings often become a surprise to the artist herself. By relying less on reason, Tyson carves a humorous, unsettling, as well as liberating approach to painting the female body, which roots it in experience rather than the merely observed.

The most comprehensive survey on Nicola Tyson’s paintings to date, spanning three decades of her career, Selected Paintings 1993-2022 provides a panoramic view of the evolving language in her paintings. With more than 150 illustrated pages dedicated to the artist’s chromatically saturated palette, the book boasts over 50 full-color reproductions of her paintings, supplemented by close-up detail images, installation shots and photographs of the artist in her studio.

The monograph includes an essay by Jennifer Higgie, which elaborates on Tyson’s feminist-informed yet intuitive methods to subjective painting. Higgie illuminates the paintings against the backdrop of the carnivalesque ethos of 1970s queer life in London, in which Tyson came of age, as well as the fertile experiments of Trial BALLOON - the feminist-collective space that the artist founded in the 1990s upon her move to New York. Selected Paintings 1993-2022 offers readers the opportunity to delectate in the sumptuous details of Nicola Tyson’s idiosyncratic and startlingly mysterious vision, all while gaining a thorough understanding of what drives her painting practice.

Nicola Tyson was born and raised in London and studied art at Central Saint Martins in the 1980s. While pursuing her foundation courses in the late 1970s, Tyson frequented a small bar named Billy’s where she photographed the burgeoning New Romantic’s club scene. The scene’s flamboyant post-punk attitude has forever influenced the vibrant colors, fashion conscious composition and non-binary abstracted figuration in her paintings that she has become known for after relocating to New York City in the 1990s.

Tyson’s subject matter has always been infused with an imaginative feminism that can be described as finding her own voice emancipated from theory. In the early 1990s, she opened a women’s-only gallery, Trial BALLOON, that went on to launch the careers of Lutz Bacher and Nicole Eisenman. Her book of autobiographical missives to dead male artists, Dead Letter Men, emphasized her wry humor and feminist criticality to this day imbues her radical figuration. Tyson’s drawings and paintings show two sides of her practice. Her graphite works on paper are often completed in one sitting much like a surrealist automatic drawing. The paintings take on a slower approach. The artist lays down gesture in Zen-like strokes upon the canvas. Tyson’s dry-brush style (where the acrylic is applied slightly dry to create a specialized impasto) often show radiating energy that gives life to her solitary figures and botanicals.

Nicola Tyson’s paintings, drawings, and sculpture have been the subject of two survey exhibitions: Kunsthalle Zurich (1998) and The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2017). She is represented by Petzel, New York; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles and Brussels.

Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer who lives in London. Previously the editor of frieze magazine and the presenter of Bow Down, a podcast about women in art history, she is the author and illustrator of the children’s book There’s Not One; the editor of The Artist’s Joke and author of the novel Bedlam. Her books The Mirror & The Palette: Rebellion, Resilience and Resistance: 500 Years of Women’s Self Portraits (2021) and The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and theSpirit (2023) are published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. She also writes screenplays.

Jennifer has been a judge of the Paul Hamlyn Award, the Turner Prize, the John Moore’s Painting Prize, and a member of the advisory boards of Arts Council England, the British Council Venice Biennale Commission, the Contemporary Art Society and the Imperial War Museum Art Commissions.