For the spring of 2022, Nature Morte returns to New York City in a small storefront gallery space in the neighbourhood of Tribeca, reminiscent of its original space in the East Village from 1982 to 1988. Our second exhibition brings together the works of four artists and connects the gallery’s history in New York with its presence in South Asia.

Recent developments in the contemporary art world of have allowed for the resuscitation and renegotiation of the issue of Spirituality in Art. While the artists in our present exhibition may not ascribe any spiritual, mystical, or metaphysical inspirations or interpretations to their practices or works, there is something certainly “uncanny” in the methods in which all four artists approach their materials and the subsequent results they manifest with them. The shift in the 20th Century from Surrealism to Abstraction has been well documented, and our four artists seem to revisit this trajectory, adding sprinklings of Op and Process Art along the way. In paintings by Faruqee/Driscoll and Larmon and textile works by Sundaram, we sense something of the artists’ surprise with the final work, having little preconceived notions when they started out and allowing chance to guide them along a path to a finish line. Perhaps we can call these works Theosophical Abstraction, as any and all spiritual/religious/philosophical references might be applied to any of the works, entirely at the behest of the viewer. Our four artists certainly seem to be tapping into subconscious energies and exploiting nerves which connect vision with thought. The works in our exhibition are ectoplasms which link the personal with the collective, escalators that connect that which the hand makes with what the eye perceives and the brain registers.

Anoka Faruqee (b. 1972, Ann Arbor, MI) and David Driscoll (b. 1964, Steubenville, OH) are painters who began collaborating in 2012. Faruqee earned her MFA from the Tyler School of Art in 1997 and her BA in Painting from Yale University in 1994. Driscoll earned his BFA from Ohio State University in 1987. Prior to collaborating, Faruqee exhibited her paintings at MoMA PS1, New York, and Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, among others. Driscoll exhibited his paintings at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, and Thomas Blackman Associates, Chicago, among others. Their 2005 two-person exhibition at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago was reviewed in the Art in America and the Chicago Sun Times. Faruqee and Driscoll have since exhibited their collaborative work at the Secession, Vienna; Björkholem Gallery, Stockholm; The Suburban, Milwaukee; DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; and Koenig & Clinton Gallery, New York. Their paintings have been recently written about in Artforum, the New York Times, and Hyperallergic. They live and work in New Haven, CT, where Faruqee is Associate Dean of the Yale School of Art.

Kevin Larmon (b. Syracuse, NY, 1955) For over three decades, Kevin Larmon has received critical acclaim for creating paintings that lyrically explore the divide between abstraction and referential imagery. His work has been associated with the post-conceptualism and neo-conceptual art movements, which were prominent aspects of exhibitions of the early 80s East Village Gallery Nature Morte and with critics/curators Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo shaping the nature of painting after the rise of conceptual art. Larmon was also associated with Feature Inc., a gallery that was first established in Chicago in 1984, and eventually moved to New York City. His work is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas, Austin among others. He is the recipient of an Atlantic-Pacific Fellowship and a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant. Larmon retired from being an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator Art, Design, and Transmedia in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, New York in 2018. He received a BFA from Harper College, S.U.N.Y., Binghamton, and currently resides in upstate New York.

Sagarika Sundaram (b. Kolkata, 1986) makes textile tapestry, sculpture and installation. Her work has recently been exhibited at Frieze New York (2021, with Jhaveri Contemporary), Nature Morte, New Delhi and Frestonian Gallery, London. In 2022 she was awarded The Hopper Prize, a Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship and a residency at Art Omi. Sundaram graduated with an MFA in Textiles from Parsons / The New School, NY and previously studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad & at MICA in Baltimore. Sundaram is Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt. She lives and works in New York.