Nicholas Modrzewski

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

I work across painting, mask-making and installation to explore how the human body is shaped by abstract systems like law, language and social etiquette. Building on my background as a lawyer, I am interested in the gap between the precise language of rules and the unruly bodies they attempt to govern. In my paintings, figures appear in frenetic states of movement, shifting between states. Faces and limbs break apart and weave through gestures and grounds, as if bent out of shape by invisible forces. Working primarily in acrylic and charcoal on linen, I draw, paint and carve images into the surface. I then pour, sand and erase them away, building up, destroying and re-inventing the picture in the process. I rarely show the body in its entirety. It is half-buried, partly visible, or merged with animal forms into hybrids. Through the persistent erosion of the painting’s surface, legible imagery fractures and recedes before resurfacing via methods of excavation, so that the borders between ground and subject become porous, as do the distinctions between species, languages, and environments. Oscillating between aerial and microscopic vantage points, the paintings resist a single, stable position from which to read the surface, producing a disorienting immersion within the picture plane. For my masks, I am interested in similar questions of legibility and representation, primarily the question: “what is a face?” I cast the masks on my own body with thermoplastic, molding them...

Artwork