Talk Art

We meet emerging artist Nash Glynn, from her studio in New York's Seaport! Nash Glynn (b.1992) is a transdisciplinary American artist currently working in NYC. Working across painting, photography, and video, Glynn is best known for her groundbreaking nude self-portraits of her experience and life as a transgender woman, an underrepresented figure in the Western art canon until recently. Glynn was born and raised in Miami, Florida and learned to paint while working at her father's set design shop. Speaking about their work, the artist says, ‘I use paint as I use my body, and as such the possibilities for spontaneity of form and change become inexhaustible. By crafting affective figures I seek to create empathy. The work serves as an affirmation, a reminder that representation has no outside, meaning we choose the reference, add and remove as we please, manipulate each stroke with unique gesture and tone. A process of painting, also known as self-determination.’

Nash Glynn (b.1992) received her BFA in 2014 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and in 2017 her MFA from Columbia University. She has had solo shows at Participant Inc. in 2019, OCD Chinatown in 2020, and an upcoming exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles in Fall 2021. Her work has been in publications such as Artforum, Candy Transversal Magazine, and New American Paintings. Glynn was the recipient of the Leslie-Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship in 2017.

"Interiors, with its plural title, belies the singularity of Glynn’s point of view. Lately, she sticks to painting what she sees from the swivel stool she’s positioned between window and easel, things like: apples in a bowl, closed door, knife. Herself in a mirror, or her mind’s eye. Mostly windows. Yet this self-imposed agreement comes with a proviso to also see with her eyes closed, so as to produce landscapes that look mental. Glynn’s intuitive aversion to the rules of the physical world finds its clearest expression in her palette, which has the firmness of a signature. Alice Neel’s cobalt, Paul Gauguin’s vermillion, Lucian Freud’s mauve are all her colours now. Mixing: as little as possible. Earth tones: no. When she concedes the need for green in a landscape, the shade she uses is not actually grass but jade, à la Ferdinand Hodler; the resulting swath of field looks undulant and cold enough to pass for ocean. Then of course there is white. Rauschenberg’s white, or Ryman’s. The white of a well-rested eye, of the sand under the sun, of nothing said. Glynn has, over the past several years, developed a style of both still life and portraiture in which objects and/or subjects are exquisitely rendered and then set out on a ground that is white except for traces of shadow, so that the knife or flower or girl appears surfaced from memory." Excerpt from Catalogue Essay by Sarah Nicole Prickett from show Interiors.

Follow Nash on Instagram: @NashGlynn

Visit Nash's official website: http://www.nashglynn.com/

View images at Vielmetter, LA: https://vielmetter.com/exhibitions/nash-glynn and @Vielmetter