Nick Georgiou “Turn The Line”
Allouche Gallery
[Image: Nick Georgiou "Reclining Nude in Saguaro National Park West” (2017) discarded books, acrylic ink on wood framed in steel, 35 x 50 x 4 in.]
This event has ended.
TURN THE LINE – an exhibition featuring painting-like literary sculptures by Tucson-based artist Nick Georgiou. This show references the shift toward an instant and constant connection to all forms of news media, and the ambiguous impact of this changing dynamic to our society.
The work that will be on display is comprised of printed newspapers and discarded books (dictionaries, encyclopedias, text books, classics, romance novels, instruction manuals, gilded texts, etc.) that are cut, painted, and meticulously positioned. Georgiou began working on the artwork for TURN THE LINE before the 2016 presidential election with a weekly series of small, monochromatic portraits that were created with each Sunday NY Times. According to the artist, the news portrayed by the media was, and still is, dark, and seems to contradict itself multiple times a day.
Color was introduced to the gray and black mixture as a symbolic gesture of truth versus fiction, purity versus overindulgence and myth versus reality. Stories were set on top of stories and faces on top of faces. When newspapers and painted books were glued together sharing space, truth and fiction were also glued together and married.
The exhibition’s title, inspired by the idiom “turn the page,” speaks to Nick Georgiou’s process; it represents the turning, or transforming, of a page into a line in order to create an image. The title is also a reference to the lines that are made by a sentence in a book, as well as the outline of a book itself—a rectangle or square comprised of four lines— a shape that is recognized as the vehicle of form for most modern art.
A native of New York, where he was born in 1980, Georgiou graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Film & TV. He worked as a production designer on independent films before focusing full-time as a sculptor. In 2009, he moved to Tucson for an exhibition at the University of Arizona and has been based there ever since. He was commissioned by Oxford University Press and his work is in the permanent collections of The Washington Post Company and the Tucson Museum of Art. His sculptures have been exhibited at Black Rat Press, Andipa Gallery in London, Etherton Gallery in Tucson, the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield and Allouche Gallery in New York City.
“When creating the works I feel somewhat hypnotized by the material, the words that pop out, the energy transferred from human to object. It’s a blur— the lines between sculpture and painting.” – Nick Georgiou
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Schedule
from May 24, 2017 to June 25, 2017