Barbara Nessim: Stargirl

20 April - 19 June, 2021 515 West 29th St., New York

Malin Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings, ceramics and digital works by the

New York-based artist Barbara Nessim. Stargirl will feature 14 large-scale paintings from a new series of work, The Wo/men In My Life, inspired by drawings from Nessim’s sketchbooks from the 1970s. The new paintings will be accompanied by selections from several of the artist’s other most important bodies of work stretching back to the 1960s, including work on paper, ceramics and early digital art. Barbara Nessim, Beret of Tongues, 2020, oil on canvas

Born in the Bronx in 1939, Barbara Nessim’s career as a fne artist, a commercial illustrator and a pioneering digital artist spans fve decades.

Nessim learned textile design at a young age from her mother, a fashion designer in the

Manhattan garment industry. In the early 1960s, Nessim was able to fund her own education at the Pratt Institute by working on the side as a fashion and textile designer. She credits her early experience working as fashion designer as a key infuence in the development of her general aesthetic sensibility - yielding a “sense of economy” in her forms and an abiding interest in the infnite potential of simple, fowing lines. Clothing and shoes have also remained key subjects throughout Nessim’s career, particularly as they serve as indices for cultural, gender and sexual identity.

Following graduation from Pratt in 1960, Nessim embarked on the artistic project that she has pursued without interruption for over 50 years: the daily sketchbooks which she considers her

“forever books.” Aside from a number of volumes lost in a fre in 1974, Nessim’s sketchbooks remain a precise daily record of both her own life and her artistic evolutions, which she views as parallel, inseparable progressions. From the outset of this project,

Nessim established a set of creative parameters or “rules” to which she has adhered for over fve decades. Each book has dated beginning and end pages; unique drawings are rendered sequentially on every other page; no pages are ever removed and images cannot later be removed or altered.

Nessim described the centrality of the Barbara Nessim, Gift of Tongues, 2019, oil on canvas sketchbooks to her life and practice in 1991: The books tell the story, they see it all, the good parts, the bad, and the ugly. Nothing escapes. Nothing edited. It’s the rule. I hold fast to the tradition that I have created. If I did it, I have to see it. Whether I like it or not, it is all part of the process. Truth. It is not always welcome. Don’t break the rule I must continue, page after page. It must have a beginning and an end. Just as I live my life.

The development of Nessim’s prototypical, sparse use of line is evident throughout Nessim’s sketchbooks. Commenting on the stunning fecundity of Nessim’s graphic line, curator David

Galloway notes that “a single line is molded to achieve a maximum of expression” and an

“entire fgure often emerges from a single curving line.”

Socially, Nessim fourished in a proto-feminist milieu in Manhattan of the early 1960s - an era when the modern conception of feminism had not yet been seeded in the public consciousness. Nessim shared a small apartment with Gloria Steinem from 1962 to 1968 - during the publication of Steinem’ landmark “Playboy” essays and just prior to the launch of

Ms. magazine. Although Nessim never considered herself an entirely orthodox feminist, gender identity, androgyny and frank treatments of sexuality were common themes in Nessim’s work from the mid-1960s onwards. A key element of Nessim’s personal adherence to her own conception of feminism was a conviction that she needed to support herself fnancially as an artist from the beginning. In the late 1950s, Nessim’s interest in fguration, narrative illustration and economy of line was asynchronous with the dominant ethos of Abstract Expressionism, and she aggressively pursued work as a commercial illustrator in an era when the feld was virtually closed to women. Some of her earliest commissions came from softcore titles that proliferated at the time, such as Gent, Nugget and Escapade. Ironically, Nessim found the art directors of such publications to be unconcerned with her own gender and also open to her artistic experimentation and investigation of challenging themes. As the 1960s progressed,

Nessim was increasingly in demand by more mainstream publications, becoming a “pioneer of conceptual editorial illustration” whose work was particularly suited to the New Journalism of the late 1960s and 1970s. By 1967, Nessim was teaching illustration at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York. She subsequently served as Chair of the Department of Illustration at

Parsons School of Design for over a decade and is now recognized as one of the most

infuential illustrators of the late 20th century.

For her new series of paintings, The Wo/men in My Life, Nessim selected individual fgurative

drawings from her sketchbooks - enlarging the line drawings and refashioning the images as

bold, radiantly-hued paintings. The new paintings are accompanied by a selection of pastel

works from the 1970s, termed Genetic Synthesis at the time and subsequently rechristened

Who We Will Be, in which Nessim created imagined portraits from an era after sexual couplings

and procreation in a diverse society

efaced contemporaneous racial and

ethnic categories.

Also drawn from the 1970s are a

selection from Nessim’s provocative

WomanGirl series. The images depict

fgures sparsely adorned with elements

of clothing and belts, but with exposed

breasts and genitals. Nessim’s

rendering of the fgures’ pudenda as

hairless lent a sense of ambiguity to

their ages - depicting them as

“somewhere between the age of child

and adult…at once sexually ambiguous

and iconic representations of

unexplored [sexuality]” in the words of Barbara Nessim, Yvonne with Rainbow Panties, 1973, pen and ink on watercolor paper. writer Anne Telford. The WomanGirl fgures confront the viewer with striking immediacy and overt sexuality, yet retain a sense of aloofness or emotional remove. When the series was frst exhibited at Corridor Gallery in Soho in 1973, fyers were continuously removed and public obscenity charges were threatened. With their enigmatic evocations of sexual desire, confrontation and feminine power, the WomanGirl works remain challenging for the viewer nearly ffty years later.

Stargirl also features a selection of Nessim’s Fantasy Shoe drawings from the 1960s. Women’s shoes are a recurring subject for Nessim, whose roots in fashion design later fowered in her artistic imagination as wildly exotic sartorial visions. Vibrant, robust and often anthropomorphic, the shoe drawings manage to project themes of cultural, political and sexual liberation. “The shoe is Nessim’s sartorial object par excellence, but it is also a personal crest that channels her observations of consumption, gender, sex and power,” writes Anne Telford.

For a period in the 1970s, the luxury Italian brand Carber produced a line of shoes based on

Nessim’s designs under the label Barbara for Carber. Eccentricity notwithstanding, Nessim’s shoe designs cannily embodied the zeitgeist of the age. The shoes “embraced…the aesthetic needs of her contemporary 1970s clientele, and they like-wise emerged—as did the artist’s shoe…illustrations— from the independent mindedness, liberated sexuality, multi-cultic trends and eclectic palette of the

‘Youthquake’ era.”i In the current exhibition,

Nessim reimagines the material incarnations of her fantasy shoes in a Barbara Nessim, Brown Sole, Half Cylinder and Dots 1969, pen and ink on watercolor paper. series of recent ceramic sculptures entitled Souls / Soles.

In the early 1980s, Nessim’s vigorous artistic curiosity led her to become one of the frst artists of note to produce digital artworks. At a time when computers were mostly restricted to major academic and research institutions, Nessim gained access to a IPS-2 Telidon by Norpak system owned by Time Video Information Service in Manhattan. After being appointed as an artist in residence for Time, Nessim was able to access the system from 5 PM to 9 AM, when it was otherwise unoccupied. Over two years, Nessim taught herself to program using scant documentation available in manuals and a running log of her work - at a time when many lines of code to render a simple line. On the fnal night that she worked on the Norpak, she created an intriguing video of herself working on the Norpak entitled Face to Face, which is viewable on our gallery website or YouTube channel.

Nessim became a regular participant at the annual Special Interest Group on Computer

Graphics (SIGGRAPH), which was dominated by engineers rather than visual artists. Cynthia

Goodman, curator of the watershed Computers and Art exhibition, highlights Nessim’s courageousness in embracing the nascent feld of digital art at that point in her career:

“At the very moment where her work as a graphic artist was achieving world-wide acclaim,

[Nessim] chose to go in a challenging new direction and into a domain where she was virtually unknown.” Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Nessim undertook a series of pioneering digital projects. In her landmark 1991 gallery show Random Access Memories, Nessim devised a system whereby visitors could create and print their own unique catalogues in the gallery, with over 48 million possible variations. Groundbreaking digital art curator Douglas Dodds of the London’s Victoria & Albert Museum cites Random Access Memories as the frst foray into what would become the feld of generative printing and book design, noting that “Random

Access Memories was perhaps the frst fully-realized computer-generated artist’s book to be produced interactively, with input by the intended viewer…Nessim was one of the frst artists— if not the frst—to bring illustration and book design into the digital age.”

In a 1986 exhibition at Shiseido Ginza Gallery in Tokyo, Nessim worked directly with the NEC corporation to utilize new technology in the gallery. While in Japan, Nessim also gained access to the frst prototype of a color inkjet printer: the Jetgraphy 3000 system by Digex. Nessim created a series of fve digital works using this technology. Hand Memory (1986) was inspired by a Japanese television documentary on ancient cave paintings, in which spray paint was used to elucidate the handprints of the cave art creators. In the resulting work,

Nessim incorporates the silver handprints into a fgurative portrait with an aura of radiating digital strokes - thereby evoking the span of human visual creativity from the earliest mark-making to cutting edge digital image production. Unfortunately, the paper and inks used in the three NEC works - Hand Memory, The Gift and

Flowers in the Wind — are non-archival, and thus the unique prints are extremely fragile at this point. As part of Stargirl, we will be ofering these three digital works in the form of unique NFTS, thus recalibrating Nessim’s position as a digital art vanguard to the present day. Barbara Nessim, Hand Memory, digital fle, 1986; unique NFT, 2021. Barbara Nessim (born 1939, Bronx, NY) is a

New York based artist and illustrator whose career spans six decades. Her practice encompasses fne art and illustration - constantly challenging and subverting the perceived separation between the felds. In the early 1960s, Nessim was one of the frst full- time professional women illustrators working in the United States. She produced designs for many top publications including The New York

Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Time, New York and Esquire. Nessim began to teach illustration at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York in 1967. She subsequently served as the Chair of the Department of Illustration at Parsons in New York for over a decade. Nessim was awarded the Pratt Lifetime Achievement Award and was recently inducted into the Society of

Illustrators Hall of Fame. At the dawn of the computer age, Nessim was one of the frst artists of note to begin using the computer as an artistic tool. She taught in the Master’s degree program in digital illustration at SVA and fostered widespread adoption of digital technologies as the Chairperson of Illustration at Parsons School of Design.

Nessim’s artworks have been broadly shown at institutions including The Louvre, The Whitney

Museum of American Art, The Smithsonian and The Bard Center, The Victoria & Albert Museum in London mounted a major retrospective in 2013, entitled Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life.

Nessim’s work is in the permanent collections of major institutions, including The Whitney

Museum of American Art, The Victoria & Albert Museum, The Szépmüvészeti Museum

(Budapest), The Museum of Modern Art (Lund, Sweden) and The Smithsonian (Washington,

DC).

Malin Gallery (formerly Burning in Water Gallery) is a New York-based contemporary art gallery. With a close-knit group of roster artists and industry professionals, Malin Gallery is a

21st century gallery that still maintains a classical value system of integrity, scholarship, and long-term support of individual artists.

Founded in 2015 by Dr. Barry Thomas Malin as Burning in Water, Malin Gallery actively represents a diverse roster of living artists. The curatorial program combines exhibitions by roster artists with historically-oriented shows, particularly of work by previously under- recognized artists. The gallery’s progressive approach to curation has earned it a reputation in both introducing and re-introducing important artists to a NY audience. Malin Gallery exhibitions have been reviewed in multiple national publications, including The New York Times, The New

Yorker, Artforum, The Wall Street Journal, ARTnews, Time Out - New York, Galerie, The

San Francisco Chronicle, The London Review of Books and Artnet News. Gallery artists are included in renowned public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art,

New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the

National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.); the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), the Saint

Louis Art Museum; and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Gallery artists have also received important grants and awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a New York

Foundation for the Arts Grant, National Endowment for the Arts Award, Robert Rauschenberg

Fellowship, the Art for Justice Fund Grant and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

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Principal

Barry Thomas Malin [email protected]

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Catherine Hanczor [email protected]

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IG:@malingallery i Elyssa Dimant, “Walking as WomanGirl,” Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life, (Abrams: New York, 2011)