Mauss, who works across drawing, sculpting, painting, performing, archiving, and writing, actively pushes the boundaries of the methods he uses to form physical manifestations of the culmination of experiments and ideas he has considered throughout his career. Actively constructing an archive of metabolized images, spaces, and gestures at the threshold between making and unmaking, the artist’s critical eye had led him to suggest poignant connections between artistic output and other genres, such as performance and craft-making, primarily within institutional contexts. Beyond this conceptual framework, Mauss’ approach to creating compositions and examining the physical properties of his chosen mediums has resulted in an expansive body of work that brings forth these ideas through compelling physical forms and objects.

Through a recent residency at Cité internationale des arts in Paris, Mauss was able to collaborate with the Italian ceramic atelier, Botegga Gatti in Faenza, where he has worked for over a decade. This studio, which has been operational since the Futurists started working in the early 20th century, is known for its support in realizing impressive works from some of Italy’s most prominent modernists, as well as inventing new approaches to applying reflective coating onto clayworks. These roots in forward-thinking approaches to artmaking compelled Mauss to form a bond with this place to attempt new forms of experimentation.

Last year, the artist began mixing black and white clays together, which would explode in the kiln. Rather than throwing out these shards, Mauss considered the ways in which these forms could be utilized and fused with other structures. Combining techniques of drawing, painting and textile printing on crude and fired clay, Mauss surfaces distinct image-fragments, glazed together to form an abrupt syntax of pattern, drawing, feeling, and material reactivity. To achieve a sense of simultaneity, fragility, and incomprehension, registering every gesture in the memory of the material, Mauss, in the words of art historian Richard Meyer, “entwines the past with the present.” What used to present as flat glazed sculptures now curl up, warp, and develop reliefed elements as they are cut, torn, layered and collide into one another. Shadows that form when these objects are hung on walls or placed on pedestals also become part of the works, and demonstrate the multidimensionality Mauss considered with each new body of work.

Nick Mauss was born in 1980 and works in New York. He recently completed a residency at Cité internationale des arts in Paris. In 2022, Mauss contributed as an invited artist to the survey exhibition of Christian Bérard at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Basel (2020); Whitney Museum of American Art (2018); Triennale di Milano and Torre Velasca, Milan (2018); and Intricate Others at Museo Serralves, Porto (2017). His works are included in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Lenbachhaus, Munich; M+, Hong Kong; Museo Serralves, Porto; the Long Museum, Shanghai; Nouveau Musée national de Monaco; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. In 2018, Mauss created a permanent installation commissioned for the I.M. Pei designed Building 66 on the MIT campus in Cambridge, USA.