James Nares: HIGH SPEED DRAWINGS

In a similar fashion to his Brushstroke paintings and ROAD PAINT series, Nares re-appropriates mechanical tools to create his artworks. He utilizes a spinning steel drum, powered by a motor. As the drum, with paper fastened to it, rotates, the artist draws lines of ink using paintbrushes he has created specifically for this body of work. As a result of the spinning drum and the artist’s precise movements, each band takes its own form. Nares’ artworks showcase his exploration on the subject of movement; some drawings he creates with one steady line, others from a continuously repeating stroke, but all manifest a careful choreography of spontaneity and control.

James Nares was born in London in 1953 and currently lives and works in New York. In 2008, Anthology Film Archives hosted a complete retrospective of his films and videos. His film STREET was the centerpiece of an exhibition of the same name at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013. STREET was also exhibited at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (2014); Sundance Film Festival in Park City, UT (2014); Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, NE (2014); North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC (2014); and the Wadsworth Antheneum in Hartford, CT (2013) among others. His work is included in a number of public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wadsworth Atheneum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. In Spring 2014, Rizzoli published the first monograph dedicated to James Nares’ work in all media over the last four decades.