Inaugurated in October 2021, the Leuven-based Nomadic Art Gallery unveils its second in situ exhibition as New Zealand artists Oliver Cain and Chloe Marsters and Belgium-based artists Merijn Verhelst, Amat Gueye, and Layla Saâd jointly explore, twist, and deconstruct the many, often controversial and at times conflicting, meanings that surround the nipple.
Nipple Twist | December 3, 2021 – January 14, 2022
Ocean Breeze | January 15—March 3, 2022
Left. Merijn Verhelst, Untitled 1, 2021. Acrylic on wooden construction, 60 x 82 x 3.75 cm. Courtesy of The Nomadic Art Gallery and the artist. Right. Oliver Cain, Yellow Pink, 2021. Ceramic and wooden frame, 40 x 45 cm. Courtesy of The Nomadic Art Gallery and the artist.
November 23, 2021 (Leuven, Belgium) – Following the successful opening of its first physical space in Leuven, Belgium, in October 2021, The Nomadic Art Gallery, the contemporary art gallery and public art and research project founded in 2020 by Gie and Arthur Buerms, pursues its exploration of the New Zealand contemporary art scene with its second on-site exhibition, Nipple Twist. From December 3, 2021—January 14, 2022, the group presentation places once again NZ artists in dialogue with their European peers, as Oliver Cain (b. 1996, United Kingdom) and Chloe Marsters (b. 1989, Auckland) in tandem with Merijn Verhelst (b. 1991, Leuven), Amat Gueye (b. 1995, Paris), and Layla Saâd (b. 1997, Liège) investigate the semantic and conceptual connotations behind this controversial body part.
Ushering in the gallery’s 2022 digital exhibitions program, dedicated exclusively to NZ’s contemporary scene, the much-anticipated Ocean Breeze, a showcase of lens-based artists Edith Amituanai, Sione Monu, Raymond Sagalopulutele, and Taute Vai will open on The Nomadic Art Gallery’s digital platform on January 15, 2022 – revisiting the groundbreaking 1994 Bottled Ocean exhibition which for the first time brought contemporary Pacific art onto the international stage.
Nipple Twist can be thought of as a two-part exhibition, where notions of gender and sexuality assume a sense of escapism as they meet in the many forms and meanings behind the nipple. Expanding across the gallery’s four distinct spaces, the five artists playfully embrace and revisit the silenced body feature’s manifold connotations, both materially and in the shared imaginary, bringing into question cultural customs and societal conventions.
Turning to the material, literal, understanding of the nipple, Oliver Cain, an English-New Zealand artist based in Auckland, sets the tone for the rest of the exhibition. The physicality of his subverted ceramic sculptures reflects that of the subject at hand, as he boldly appropriates and transforms its form. Cast in a plurality of shapes and sizes, the strangely frivolous nipples pop out of the seeming confines of their rectangular frames. Pointing to Cain’s curious post-pop art touch, the bright, contrasting colors of the 24 ceramic nipple-wooden framed sculptures place the nipple on the center stage as a newly found irreverence comes to replace the initial sense of eroticism.
Amat Gueye, Caverne Mystère, 2021. Ink on glossy paper on mounted wooden box, 152 x 107 x 4 cm. Courtesy of The Nomadic Art Gallery and the artist.
Auckland-based artist Chloe Marsters’s intricate drawings and prints push Cain’s questioning further. Absorbing viewers in the organic, sensual embrace of her female figures, Marsters sets forth a soft yet seductive nudity, one impressed in the flowing natural elements, stalks and beetles alike, that constitute and cover their skins. Surrounded by spikes and leaves, the works acquire an added, yet untouchable materiality – subtly suggestive, at once brazenly tempting and entirely fetishized.
Set in the lower floor under an evocative red light, Liège-based artist Layla Saâd’s sensuous photographs thrust the fetish onto the sanctified. Controversy transpires through her work, both in her choice of subjects, nameless women met at the margins of society, and in her partial representation of their bodies. Helplessly lured by these forms, viewers are forced to confront their own, senseless projections: those of a society that dictates a repudiation of the body, only to give it an all-the-more powerful appeal.
In sum, by plainly representing it, Cain, Marsters, and Saâd jointly twist the meaning of the nipple, laying it bare as a shifting social construct.
“Delving into the work of these widely diverse artists, each distinctly twisting and pushing the constraints of his chosen medium, the notion of nipple twist, one seemingly hailing a very culturally specific meaning, takes on a markedly universal sense. The meaning of this western idiom comes to mirror that of the nipple itself – a shifting, sometimes contradictory one, rooted in societal constructs.” – Gie and Arthur Buerms
Left. Layla Saâd, Der Rum 2, 2018. Inkjet print on aluminum, 50 x 75 cm. Courtesy of The Nomadic Art Gallery and the artist. Right. Chloe Marsters, Lottia, 2021. Ink and marker on paper, 42 x 29.7 cm. Courtesy of The Nomadic Art Gallery and the artist.
Offering a conceptual reading of the term, Leuven- and Brussels-based artists Merijn Verhelst and Amat Gueye move from the representation to the interpretation of the culturally rooted term: their works are the nipple twist. Genital and scatological jokes fill Verhelst’s sculptural paintings, evoking an initial feeling of pointlessness. As the wooden works’ multiple layers gradually appear, as patches of black paint leak from the seemingly joyous colors, entry points into the artist’s singular world, nods to a childhood reality and secret imaginary, emerge, visually twisting viewers’ initial response.
In a similar vein, Gueye oscillates between methodology and happenstance. His deliberate choice of material and random subject matter comes to embody the volatile nature of contemporary culture. No distinct images stick on his wooden canvases. Instead, blurred forms mysteriously suggest the remnants of a shared, almost lost, visual language – barely perceptible hints to shared pop symbols, cartoons, and childhood memories. Faced by a hazed meaning, viewers latch on to these references, left to wander the border between the imagined and the real.
By giving voice to its endless physical, cultural, historical, and personal meanings, the exhibition strips the nipple from all and any set definition, thereby unsettling viewers into their very own nipple twist. Calling out the volatility of these meanings, the artists commonly engage against the stream of conservatism and censorship, hailing instead a newly found sense of semantic, and universal, freedom.
As this second part of The Nomadic Art Gallery’s New Zealand chapter continues to unfold – the result of Gie and Buerms’s one-year in situ immersion into the underrepresented NZ art scene investing a repurposed truck as a mobile gallery – the duo reflects:
“By engaging with this subject matter, the artists lead viewers into a form of visual and semantic introspection which ultimately liberates them from these constructs. In doing so, regardless of their background, whether from Europe or from New Zealand, they aptly point to obsolete sociocultural norms, tinged with conservatism and censorship, which they deconstruct together.”
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NOTES TO EDITORS:
About The Nomadic Art Gallery, Leuven, Belgium:
Founded in 2020 by Arthur Buerms and long-time partner Gie, The Nomadic Art Gallery is a contemporary art gallery and public art and research project currently based in Leuven, Belgium.
Building on a cyclical model rooted in the notion of nomadism, the initiative unfolds through two alternating phases. The first is an in-situ immersion within an underrepresented art scene, during which Arthur and Gie invest a mobile vehicle to conduct research in the given location, the latter ultimately becoming a public art project.
The second phase is set in a transitional gallery space – a temporary location in Europe which changes with each showcased art scene and where the duo initiates a dialogue between their research and the European contemporary art scene, through a program of both physical and online exhibitions.
Nipple Twist, group exhibition of Oliver Cain, Chloe Marsters, Merijn Verhelst, Amat Gueye, and Layla Saâd | December 3, 2021—January 14, 2022
The Nomadic Art Gallery
Brusselsesteenweg 168
3020 Herent [near Leuven], Belgium
Ocean Breeze, group exhibition of Edith Amituanai, Sione Monu, Raymond Sagalopulutele, and Taute Vai | January 15—March 3, 2022 [Digital Exhibition]
www.thenomadicartgallery.com
nomads@thenomadicartgallery.com
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Facebook | @TheNomadicArtGallery
About Oliver Cain:
Oliver Cain (b. 1996, United Kingdom) is an English-born New Zealand-based artist whose work develops and covers a wide range of topics using various materials. His artworks, subverted linguistic paintings, ceramic sculptures, and installations, bear a certain physicality, and push the boundaries between conceptualism and post-pop art.
Cain’s creative process is a key element in his practice, resulting in works that can take any form and consistence. Throughout his work, appropriated everyday objects transform stereotypes and famous art historical references are twisted. A proud member of the queer community, Cain uses his work to examine, question, and criticize the relationships between gender, (homo)sexuality and societies’ misconceptions surrounding these themes. However, and despite initial appearances, a purely erotic and queer reading of his work is often misguided as a universal profundity is always at play, revealing itself gradually to those willing to look and feel.
Oliver Cain won the Eden Arts Award in 2019 and was a finalist in the Wallace Arts Awards and NZ Contemporary Art Awards (2020/2021). Recent exhibitions include the International Ceramic Biennale of Talavera (Spain); Pātaka Art+Museum (WAA, New Zealand); Copelouzos Family Art Museum as part of the COV—ART Project (Greece); the ART MATTERS 3 online group show at Galerie Biesenbach (Germany); the It’s a Boy solo show featuring Billy Apple at Föenander Galleries (New Zealand); and Paint etc. at the Corban Estate Arts Centre (New Zealand).
About Chloe Marsters:
Chloe Marsters (b. 1989, Auckland) is an Auckland-based artist of Cook Island descent. Laureate as a teenager of the Parklane Wallace Trust Development Award as part of the prestigious Wallace Trust Art Awards in 2009, she gained critical success early on in her artistic career.
Marsters is known for her intricate and meticulous drawings and prints referencing both the human form and nature. Her tailored silhouettes, made of flowing natural elements, combine the elegant aesthetics of fashion with the punk-rock attitude that tints much of her practice.
Recent exhibitions include a pop-up group exhibition at Barrel Store Colony (New Zealand).
About Merijn Verhelst:
Merijn Verhelst (b. 1991, Leuven) is a self-taught Belgian artist currently based in Brussels. His work is deceivingly simple, at once playful and naïvely melancholic, sometimes scatological yet very much layered in sophistication. Distinct throughout his overwhelming, obtrusive sculptural paintings, his tone is at once oddly humorous and emotionally charged.
Verhelst intuitively conceives optically dazzling works, until all the separate pieces of wood, marks, lines, and forms unite into a singular world. This non-representational universe ultimately initiates a dialogue between the abundance of neon colors and formalist aesthetic, all-the-while acting as an entry point into his child imagination – a childhood freezer filled with popsicles alongside hints of secret passageways. Combining a sense of craftsmanship with select flattened brushstrokes, his X-ray, precise abstract language is a subtle combination of elements of pop art and minimalism.
Recent exhibitions include the Art strEAT solo exhibition (2019) and m0(ve)ment group show (2017) as part of Life of L (Belgium).
About Amat Gueye:
Amat Gueye (b. 1995, Paris) is a French/Senegalese artist and recent graduate of the Ecole nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre (Belgium).
Alternating between traditional and unconventional modes of painting, Gueye skillfully uses a unique technique through which he applies ink on glossy paper to create depth and optical illusions. Gueye combines figurative and abstract elements, in works that echo diversity, noise, abundance, and blurred uncertainty. Through his intense dynamics and color palette, he conceives works whose visual markers are symptomatic of a time where the flow of (digital) images is constant, extensive, and fast.
His deliberate choice of material, random subject matter, and happy accidents affecting the works create an individual and nuanced combination, echoing a shared yet impalpable contemporary visual culture. Gueye’s artistic spirit embodies a form of 1990s nostalgia and escapism, one filled with references to cartoons, video games, myths, fantasy, pulsating techno, and pinball machines.
A mélange of unseen amalgams and abstracted objects populate his wooden canvases, conceptually exploring dichotomies between the real and the digital, the natural and the artificial. Gazing through his work, one starts to wonder how much of human technology is in fact informed by nature.
Gueye has participated in several group shows in galleries and artist-run spaces in Brussels, including Rochet Sedin Gallery; Espace Adventura; and Hermany.
About Layla Saâd:
Layla Saâd (b. 1997, Liège) is a Liège-based artist and photographer. A graduate of the Photography module from the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Saint-Luc Liège (2020), Saâd won that same year the Prix Roger de Conynck awarded by the King Baudouin Foundation. In 2021, Saâd participated in the Biennale de Photographie en Condroz (Belgium) and was selected for a promising mentoring program at Agence VU (Paris), which she is currently undertaking.
With a freedom of style and technique, the young photographer explores the life of alternative worlds created on the fringes of society or in reaction to its normalized principles.