James Nares: All I Know: Frieze No.9 Cork Street
Past exhibition
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Kasmin is pleased to present the first UK solo survey of London-born, New York-based conceptual artist James Nares, on view at No.9 Cork Street in alignment with Frieze Week, 2022.
James Nares (she/her, b. London, 1953) has lived and worked in New York since 1974. Across Nares’ five-decade career, the artist’s crossdisciplinary practice has investigated, challenged and expanded the boundaries between gesture, motion, and time. Often exploring tools as an extension of the body, her work—encompassing film, music, painting, photography, and performance—examines the ways we connect to our built environment through movement, memory, and experience. A key figure of the Downtown scene in New York City in the 1970s, Nares continues to innovate and invent how both the body and machines (cameras, pendulums, and industrial equipment, among others) create images. In the artist’s words, “Things in motion; motion in things. The body has fluid; the fluid has body.” -
Revisiting these themes through aesthetically diverse mediums, the rhythmic sensibility at the core of Nares’ work is marked by a commitment to understanding the fluid nature of body and form through tactile processes in service of her compositions. With a renewed attention to the artist’s films, which have comprised a major component of Nares’ conceptual practice alongside her emblematic two-dimensional work, the exhibition encompasses both static and moving image. As Amy Taubin writes in Artforum, the artist repeatedly runs “potent, related ideas—about movement and stillness, ritual and improvisation, interior and exterior—through multiple media to define the particularities of each.” Spanning works from the 1970s to the present, the exhibition underscores Nares’ contribution to experimentation with the corporeal form as an apparatus that helped to define a generation in American art. This exhibition will be Nares’ inaugural return to the UK after 50 years of living in New York City.
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This show builds on the success of the artist’s first major museum retrospective, Nares: Moves at the Milwaukee Art Museum. It is the transfer of motion in gestural passages of “time and motion” which unites the work on view. Manifesting a careful choreography of spontaneity and control, the seminal Brushstroke (1992–ongoing) paintings and films such as Pendulum (1976) exact the artist’s underlying attention to how energy is transferred to create image and narrative. In the HIGH SPEED DRAWINGS (2014–ongoing), Nares moves at incremental speed while holding a specially designed brush and releasing a constant flow of ink onto the drawing itself which rotates in front of her on a motor driven steel drum. In her RUNWAY PAINT PAINTINGS (2016) as in the ROAD PAINT PAINTINGS (2013-2015), Nares paints with an industrial machine which releases a reflective thermoplastic paint, normally used for painting the white lines on roads and runways. The fabric of New York City considered as material—both of trace and source of action—is recalled in Monuments (2019) where rubbings of the city’s oldest surviving sidewalks, once engraved by anonymous immigrant masons, are gilded in 24 karat gold, and in the critically acclaimed film STREET (2011), whose slow-motion footage unfolds in a hypotonic and mesmerizing portrait of the urban landscape. Between the premises of physics and the physical—from body to brush, from hand to machine—the selection of recent and historical works in All I Know join in revealing new dialogues within Nares’ approach to gesture as a vision of time that is at once immediate and elongated.
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Film Screenings
A selection of films will be screened at the No.9 Cork Street during the exhibition. Screenings are open to the public, see below for dates.
Tuesday, October 11, 4–6pm | STREET (2011); Suicide? No! Murder (1977); Waiting for the Wind (1982); Game (1976); Drip (2007); Primary Function (2007); Pendulum (1976)
Saturday, October 22, 11am & 1pm | Pendulum (1976); STREET (2011); Pendulum (1976); STREET (2011); Pendulum (1976) -
“Things in motion; motion in things. The body has fluid; the fluid has body.” –James Nares
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Works
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About the Artist
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Explore
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Alma Allen
May 16 – June 22, 2024 509 West 27th Street, New YorkThe gallery’s third solo exhibition of work by Alma Allen (b. 1970) brings together new freestanding sculpture and wall reliefs. This body of work evolves various compositional and material directions explored in Allen’s recent site-specific solo exhibition Nunca Solo at Museo Anahuacalli in Mexico City, demonstrating the artist’s ongoing experimentation into the ability of matter to embody contemplations on free will, consciousness, and the nature of time. -
NARES TRACES
May 16 – June 22, 2024 297 Tenth Avenue, New YorkThe fifteenth solo exhibition at the gallery of work by multidisciplinary artist Jamie Nares (b. 1953) examines over 100 works on paper in a variety of media—namely oil, ink, and enamel—made after refocusing her artistic attention from film to painting in the early 1980s. Coolly perceptive, Nares’ works on paper share the same conceptual focus on movement, rhythm, and measurements of time that has driven the artist’s various bodies of work over the last fifty years. This exhibition points to paper as an essential instrument in Nares’ ongoing exploration of these themes.
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