Photo: Rafael Martinez
James Cohan is delighted to announce its representation of Brooklyn-based artist Naudline Pierre. The gallery will present a solo exhibition of Pierre's work in April 2022.
Naudline Pierre’s paintings draw from fantasy and iconography to conjure alternate worlds. Swirling with jewel-toned texture, her works center ecstasy, devotion, and tenderness in epic scenes that generate space for rescue and healing. Pierre’s winged figures are enveloped in vast, horizonless landscapes, where they come together in acts of intimacy and salvation: they reach longingly outward toward each other, congregate, and embrace, emoting protection and care.
Rendered in layers of prismatic-colored washes, the artist’s subjects are limitless and uniquely out of step with time. Cast within stories of sublimation, mercy, and resurrection, their ethereal bodies defy boundaries set by inherited mythology and art-historical precedent. Within these narratives, Pierre inscribes her alter-ego as protagonist—a vessel to explore the infinite future possibilities that can be accessed through imagination and self-possession.
Pierre’s work situates personal mythology and transcendent intimacy alongside canonical narratives of devotion. Her works continue the art-historical tradition of portraying encounters between the earthly and the otherworldly, extending this lineage of image-making by injecting the conventions of her discipline with ephemerality and ambiguity. Referencing the Renaissance format of the altar triptych, for example, or incorporating flattened space and forced perspective, she reconfigures formal systems from the past to generate new possible futures grounded in the here and now.
Naudline Pierre (b. 1989, Leominster, MA) received an M.F.A. from New York Academy of Art, NY, and a B.F.A. from Andrews University, MI. In 2021, her work will be featured in Prospect.5 New Orleans, and is the subject of a major forthcoming solo exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art. Pierre participated in the 2019–2020 Studio Museum’s Artist Residency and her work was exhibited in a three-person exhibition at MoMA PS1 as a culmination of the program. Pierre has participated in numerous group exhibitions, most recently at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; the Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. She was the recipient of the 2016 Estée Lauder Merit Award from the New York Academy of Art. Her work belongs to the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; The Dean Collection, Macedon, NY; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; and the CC Foundation, Shanghai, China.