Nikki Maloof is an American artist known for her still life paintings that depict animals in brightly coloured and highly patterned settings. Her drawings and oil paintings portray anthropomorphised creatures that oscillate between being humorous and unnerving.
Read MoreMaloof's artistic practice reflects on the intense emotions and frustrations humans experience in contemporary life.
Maloof was born in Peoria, Illinois. As a young child, the artist had a vivid imagination and was drawn to making and creating art.
After pursuing a creative education, Maloof attended Indiana University to study classical still life painting. She graduated in 2008 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Shortly after in 2011, Maloof completed a Master of Fine Arts at Yale University, where she studied painting and printmaking.
Nikki Maloof's interest in still life compositions comes from her curiosity in vanitas paintings, a genre of art that thrived in the Netherlands throughout the early 17th century.
Maloof's interest in vanitas lies in the genre's representation of death and impermanence. She regularly experiments with vanitas in her own artwork, contrasting the seriousness of dead animals with warm colour palettes and highly stylised backdrops. The tension between the serious and the absurd is a leitmotif of Maloof's practice.
Nikki Maloof is best known for her series of large still life paintings made using oil on canvas. Before starting a painting, Maloof prepares by creating various small drawings and paintings to map out compositional ideas.
Her still life paintings typically depict animals and sea life like disembowelled fish, crabs, and nervous looking cats, among others. The terror-stricken creatures sit amid backdrops of rich patterns and vivid colours. Chequered tiles and paisley print tablecloths are spread across countertops, where a variety of seafood is being prepared for dinner.
The detail in each work is overwhelming, an emotion Maloof wants her audience to recognise as fundamental to the artist's own consciousness as a painter and mother of two. By presenting brash patterns that swell and warp like optical illusions, Maloof provokes anxiety in the viewer.
Maloof's still life paintings portray the complex experience of being a human in postmodern society. Each painting explores the tensions between severe anxiety and contentment by presenting scenes of unsettling yet familiar domesticity.
In her painting Anxiety (2018), Maloof depicts freshly bought fish laid out on a newspaper. Although the fish are dead, Maloof teases the viewer by painting facial expressions of fear and panic on the lifeless beings. She goes one step further to induce viewers' unsettlement by headlining the newspaper the fish are laid on with the statement, 'Maintaining a Sense of Hope Proves Increasingly Difficult'. Other anxiety-provoking statements Maloof features in her paintings include 'How To Be More Resilient In Utter Chaos' and 'Cry Whenever You Need To'.
In 2008, Maloof was the recipient of the Glazer Award for the Arts, the Hutton Honors College Creative Activities Grant, and the Harry Engel Award for the Arts.
In 2010, Maloof was awarded the Gloucester Landscape Prize. In 2011, Maloof won the Helen W Winternitz Award in Painting and Printmaking.
Nikki Maloof has exhibited her work in both solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Gutted, Sorry We're Closed Gallery, Brussels (2022); Nikki Maloof: Nervous Appetite, Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); Nikki Maloof: Caught and Free, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York (2019); Separation Anxiety, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago (2018); Chauve-Souris, The Pit, Los Angeles (2017); After Midnight, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York (2016).
Group exhibitions include Dangerous Pattern, JDJ Gallery, Garrison (2021); Best in Show, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York (2021); Marfa Invitational 2021, Nino Mier Gallery, Marfa (2021); 36 Paintings, Harper's Books, New York (2020); Animal Kingdom, Alex Berggruen Gallery, New York (2020); What Did I Know Of Your Days: Danielle Orchard and Nikki Maloof, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen (2020); Cheeky: Summer Butts, Marinaro Gallery, New York (2018); Drawing Island, The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn (2017); Horror Vacui, or The Annihilation of Space, Misako & Rosen, Tokyo (2017); Imagine, Brand New Gallery, Milan (2016).
Nikki Maloof's website can be found here, and her Instagram can be found here.
Ocula | 2022
