NIK CHRISTENSEN | MODERN TRIUMPH

Press Release

Pablo’s Birthday is proud to present the first New York Solo Show by British artist Nik Christensen. The intensely analog presence of these Sumi ink paintings on paper draws a contrast to the binary intonations of their formal construction. Rather than reading as dichotomous, virtual and evident meld into the crystalline impression of a hyper reality.

Viewing Christensen’s works we reside in-between, on the liminal cusp of dissolution, yet tethered to the poetic immediacy of a moment. One doesn’t passively survey, but feels the sensation of having entered upon a fecund cinematic scene that frames our perception as a protagonist and a witness. By interspersing descriptive strokes with pixel-like building blocks, the paintings figuration fragments into abstracted kaleidoscopic picture planes creating a surreal immateriality that is countered by the assertive tangibility of both the paintings ink application and hard geometries - suspending us in a tension where things remain both transitive and explicit.