The eldersthe first exhibition at Tibor de Nagy (April 20-May 26, 2023) by anonymous artist new.shiver, follows the artist’s largely unknown first exhibition with the same title, New.shiver: The Ancients, at Satchel Projects (April 21-May 22, 2022). After seeing this person’s posts on Instagram, exchanging a handful of brief messages, and seeing actual paintings by Satchel Projects and, now, Tibor de Nagy, I’m taken by the patience of the artist, who is not emphasized in the work. No overt signs of labor and struggle can be discerned in the 20 intimate scale works in the exhibition – all between 4 x 5 and 11 x 14 inches, made up of varying densities of paint – which have a tangential relationship with gestural abstraction.
When I started to think about the history of oil painting and the different ways in which mark making work has been viewed historically – from the artist’s touch to the level of his craftsmanship to to the time it takes to complete a work – I realized how much these works challenge long-held views on these considerations. Since the rise of abstract expressionism, the work and the process – the act of laying down and scraping paint – has gone from being held in high esteem to being almost completely dismissed. With the rise of Pop Art in the early 1960s, the art world began to devalue the handmade in favor of the machine-made, and has since continued to value entrepreneurship and outsourcing, seamlessly blending the aesthetic principles to capitalist agendas. Whether it’s Andy Warhol, Richard Serra, Jeff Koons or Richard Tuttle, the removal of the artist’s hand and the minimization of craftsmanship are central to the mainstream narrative.
New.shiver and the Collectively Titled Paintings The elders reverse these long-held assumptions. According to the gallery’s press release:
Through a process of accretion, the relief paintings give the impression that the works have evolved over geologic time, with atmospheric and physical forces at work. Constantly evolving, the history of each painting is visible in its substructure. Undulating, earthy, smoldering colors build up until each painting is its own complex ecosystem. Weather is an important factor in the work of new.shiver. These are long process paintings, each work being returned and reworked over and over again. In the thickest paints, each layer can take months or years to dry enough to be reworked. Continuous interruption and unpredictable wait times suspend the trajectory of the painting…
This suspension and the patience of the artist is what makes these paintings unique. Instead of going along with the capitalist cliché about wasting time, “it’s like watching paint dry”, the artist does just that. “Sunder,” which measures 5 by 4 inches, is dated “early 2000s to 2023,” and others are also years old. Why did it take so long to make it?
The layered formations and thick sections of paint resembling brushstrokes in “Sunder” suggest the strata of the earth. If two of Jackson Pollock’s legacies are “paint as paint” and “the truth about materials”, new.shiver has pushed them in unexpected and challenging directions. Unlike the speed and bravery often associated with gestural abstraction, new.shiver slows down time in these works and in doing so invites viewers to think about how passing time might be shaped. At the same time, the paintings’ discernible strata and distinctly shaped forms convey multiple facets of the painting’s identity, from malleability to minerality. These works demonstrate that nothing is invincible.
An interplay between tonal and coloristic shifts as well as a connection between the optical and the visceral are evident in the works, in their different markings, varying paint deposits and dissimilar combinations. The months and years it takes to make them are a celebration of time and its vagaries. The palette of blues, greens, browns, reds and yellows evoke nature, while the sensual materiality of the paint suggests that the pressure of time can be embraced. Topographical surfaces, with their malleable shapes, convey a vulnerability that is rarely encountered in painting.
It reminded me of the work of Robert Ryman, who says, in Suzanne Hudson’s book Robert Ryman: used paint (2009):
I thought I would see what would happen. I wanted to see what the paint would do, how the brushes would work. It was the first step. I just played. I really had nothing in mind to paint. I was just discovering how painting worked, the colors, thick and thin, the brushes, the surfaces.
New.shiver’s paintings have a similar openness and sense of discovery. The works are both serious and fiery. Beautiful concentrations of time, they offer another way of living time, intrinsically anti-capitalist and, in this respect, a refusal of the fixation of the art world on celebrity. Almost nothing is known about the identity of this anonymous artist. The intimate scale of the paintings, the time of completion, for which it is crucial to allow thick layers to dry before adding paint, and the refusal to use one’s identity as a platform, all this further enhances a work . it was a jubilation to discover.
The elders continues at Tibor de Nagy Gallery (11 Rivington Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through May 26. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
