Opening Reception: September 17, 4 – 6PM

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to present our second exhibition with New York-based artist Nash Glynn, “Interiors”, opening in Gallery II on September 17, 2022.

“After the art handlers removed from her Lower Manhattan loft the ten new works which comprise this exhibit, Interiors, the painter Nash Glynn finally, as she had been meaning to do for weeks, phoned her accountant to ask an important tax-related question. Why, Glynn wanted to know, wasn’t the square footage of her bedroom factored—along with that of her studio—into the equation determining how much of her rent is tax-deductible? Why wasn’t a mattress considered a business expense? At the end of the day, dreaming is her business, she said. Glynn’s accountant laughed like he’d heard a joke. So she fired him.

This, you should know, is the kind of artist with whom you are dealing, the true kind whose romanticism is total. If you believe that art objects contain traces of the artist’s air, then you may also care to know that Glynn always seems to be barefoot, that she listens to Julius Eastman’s Femenine on a loop while she paints, that her mien is sweet, blithe, diaphanous, that in three years of friendship I have never once seen her in a hurry. Reverie, not just one of her moods, becomes modal in her work. Figurative painting tends to look new when it evokes something missing from contemporary life—like presence, of which Glynn’s work is full.

Interiors, with its plural title, belies the singularity of Glynn’s point of view. Lately, she sticks to painting what she sees from the swivel stool she’s positioned between window and easel, things like: apples in a bowl, closed door, knife. Herself in a mirror, or her mind’s eye. Mostly windows. Yet this self-imposed agreement comes with a proviso to also see with her eyes closed, so as to produce landscapes that look mental.

Installation image credit: Jeff McLane

Glynn’s intuitive aversion to the rules of the physical world finds its clearest expression in her palette, which has the firmness of a signature. Alice Neel’s cobalt, Paul Gauguin’s vermillion, Lucian Freud’s mauve are all her colours now. Mixing: as little as possible. Earth tones: no. When she concedes the need for green in a landscape, the shade she uses is not actually grass but jade, à la Ferdinand Hodler; the resulting swath of field looks undulant and cold enough to pass for ocean.

Then of course there is white. Rauschenberg’s white, or Ryman’s. The white of a well-rested eye, of the sand under the sun, of nothing said. Glynn has, over the past several years, developed a style of both still life and portraiture in which objects and/or subjects are exquisitely rendered and then set out on a ground that is white except for traces of shadow, so that the knife or flower or girl appears surfaced from memory. As the canvases get bigger, the white space naturally expands; the objects/subjects do not. In “Still Life” (2022), a life-size reproduction of a human skull is nearly swallowed whole by the enormous ground, saved at the last minute by three quick lines to indicate perspective, really to say we’re at home. (Tempting to perceive here a joke, maybe even a statement, about becoming a bigger and bigger artist while remaining… oneself. But no one wants to be the accountant.) Standing here, you are going to have to decide whether this is in fact a still life, or whether it is maybe a very bleak self-portrait, or whether it is, perhaps, a painting of white space with an empty head included for scale.

In Interiors, the world outside the windows is scenic, frameable, and ruled by perspective; the inside world is paradoxically vast and unbounded. Half of these paintings appear from a distance to be edgeless, because the edges and the corners are all white and because the walls behind the canvas are almost the same white. Undifferentiated ground expands into a space of non-differentiation. (Buddhists will know what I mean, even if I don’t.) Edgelessness feels new in this kind of painting. But it doesn’t feel anxious, it feels cool.”

Text by Sarah Nicole Prickett

Nash Glynn (b.1992) lives and works in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions include “Interior” at Vielmetter Los Angeles; “Self Portrait with One Foot Forward and One Hand Reaching Out,” OCD Chi- natown, New York, NY; “The Future is Fiction,” Participant Inc, New York, NY. Group exhibitions in- clude “My Flannel Knickers,” Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY; “Myselves,” Kohn Gallery, Los An- geles, CA; “Intimate Companions,” Mary Heaton Vorse House, Provincetown, MA; “No No Desire De- sire,” Maison Populaire, Paris, FR; “Unexpected Encounters,” Latvian National Museum of Art, Latvia; “Grounded,” Spinello Projects, Miami, FL; “Night & Day,” Thierry Goldberg, New York, NY; “Cross- roads,” Judson Memorial Church, New York, NY; “Alternate Routes,” The Leslie Lohman Museum, SoHo, NY; “Cheeky: Summer Butts,” Marinara Gallery, New York, NY.