Chris Nau “I’m Not Your Animal”

The Painting Center

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The Painting Center presents I’m Not Your Animal, an exhibition of new work by the Brooklyn-based painter Chris Nau.

Nau’s experience working across painting, printmaking, drawing, and sculpture is evident in the new mid-scale paintings on view. They embrace a muscular abstraction of rough-hewn forms in an uneasy truce with heraldic color and pattern. The title of the exhibition is drawn from a song called Riverbed by Another Sky. The music, with its crashes and implosions, mirrors the manner in which the signature painting I’m Not Your Animal (2022) resolved in the artist’s Brooklyn studio.

The paintings evolve from small graphite-on-paper sketches—erased and redrawn so often that the paper itself barely holds—that are transferred to canvas. Nau uses what he calls “a rough and clumsy approach” utilizing all manner of brushes, implements, and tools to create loosely controlled marks. The ambiguous relationship between the figures and the background furthers the goal of the artist who strives to create a “dynamic, hybrid form that suggests the beauty and power as well as the complicated problems and destructive tendencies of human beings.”

Chris Nau (b. 1973, Elgin, IL) earned a BFA in painting and a BA in interdisciplinary arts from the University of Washington, Seattle. In 2001, he earned an MA/MFA from Massachusetts College of Art working in painting, printmaking, and drawing. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions globally and across the United States at institutions including the Jewett Gallery at Wellesley College; Galerie Kristine Hamann, Wismar, Germany; G.A.S. - station gallery, Berlin; The Drawing Center, NYC; The Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; and The Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston. Nau has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Dieu Donné Workspace Residency. as well as grants from the American Embassy in Oslo, the Norwegian Artistic Foundation, and the Tegnerforbundet Norwegian Center for Drawing.