Pace Prints collaborator Nicola López will have a solo exhibition of massive woodcut prints, installed in a site-specific installation at Jacob Lewis Gallery, 521 W. 26th Street, 4th Floor. Big Windows : Skin : Portals will be on view May 19, 2017—June 30, 2017, with an opening reception May 18, 6-8pm.
From the gallery:
In Big Windows : Skin : Portals, Nicola López draws on her recent monumental installation In Gentle Defiance of Gravity and Form at Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, to explore architecture as a metaphor for the human experience on both societal and individual levels. Here, López bisects the gallery with the framed-out structure of a wall supporting oversized woodcut prints of windows. The work reorients the viewer’s experience of architecture by creating an exterior within the gallery interior. This constructed slice of cityscape exposes the force and fragility of architectural ambition.
“In a way architecture is very much an externalization of our cultural values,” López explains in an interview at the MOCA Jacksonville, “It seeks to express a society of strength and potential and power but also embodies the real fragility of it.”
At the same time as it speaks to cultural values and aspirations, architecture also serves as a metaphor for the human body. Galvanized steel studs are the bones of a structural skeleton that is skinned by the mylar prints. The windows are at once barrier and portal: the thin membrane that marks the limit between what lies within and what lies beyond.
