New paintings by Paul Henry Ramirez

Caren Golden Fine Art is pleased to present OverGrowth, Nicola López's second solo exhibition with the gallery. In her new installation work and drawings López continues her investigation into the relationship between nature and technology. Although nature itself rarely makes a direct appearance in her work, it is constantly present both in its glaring absence and in technology's organic patterns of growth, mutation and parasitism. Looking at the hulking structures of pylons twisted into tree-like forms, the creeping vines of cables and tubing, and architectural structures swirling with the ferocity of a hurricane, we are presented with a world grown wild and beyond control. In creating images of cityscapes and structures that struggle against themselves as they strive towards order and yet verge on the edge of breakdown, López questions our society's insistence upon growth and glorification of technology.

It is apparent that to López this story does not simply end where the utopian dream goes bad. There is another chapter in which the border between nature and technology begins to blur, where a new life cycle emerges as nature itself co-opts the very building blocks of our man-made world. We are forced to ask if this indicates a triumph of what is built or what is natural—or if they are even truly separable from one another. In either case, will this version of “unnatural” nature ultimately thrive or will it bend and break under its own weight?

A graduate of Columbia University's MFA program, Nicola López’s work has been reproduced in Art in America, Artforum, Art on Paper, Planet Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and most recently as a full page image in the August, 2006 issue of Harper’s. In the past two years she has participated in museum exhibitions at The Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, ME, The Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA, The Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, OH, The Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, AR, El Museo del Barrio in New York City and The Museo de Arte of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
A Promising Tomorrow, López’s site-specific installation first presented in the the Museo Cultural in Santa Fe, NM and then in the Greater New York 2005 exhibition at PS 1, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art and is on view at MOMA in the Since 2000: Printmaking Now exhibition through September 18, 2006.