ROBERT NAVA

Rendered through a raw, energetic mixing of spray paint, acrylics, and grease pencil, his large-scale paintings of fantastical beasts exude a playful candidness that defies the pretentions of high art and invites viewers to reconnect with the unbridled imagination of their childhoods.

To develop his uncompromisingly personal style, Nava first dispensed with the rules and conventional attitudes that he had learned while obtaining his MFA at Yale University—an attitude that aligns him with the irreverent ‘bad’ painting first theorised in 1978 by the New Museum’s founding curator Marcia Tucker. Nonetheless, Nava’s hybrid monsters, which range from the dragon-like to the angelic, are thought-out composites that the artist continuously reworks in his sketchbooks. Drawing, in fact, constitutes the bedrock of his practice, a daily discipline of invention.

Often created to the vitalising beat of techno music, his paintings conjure a realm awash in magic and possibility, where beings are always seemingly on the verge of transmogrification. Though offering viewers respite from the more cynical and dystopian aspects of today’s world, his paintings do not, however, veer into escapism. Violence and destruction are continuously implied by the ferocity of his depicted animals and the iconoclastic nature of his graffiti-like markings, which build on the gesturalism of Cy Twombly and Jean-Michel Basquiat. His work thus reacquaints viewers with an almost childlike capacity for fantasy and creativity, while offering a meditation on the loss of innocence and its recuperation.

Nava’s work can be found in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the ICA Miami, and Zuzeum Art Centre, Latvia. His art has been exhibited in various solo exhibitions both domestically and abroad, including Mythologies (2019) at V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Vs (2019), Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. His work has also been featured in several group exhibitions, most recently, Majeure Force (2020) at Night Gallery and Punch (2019) at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA.

Courtesy Pace Gallery