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.
Still Life Paintings
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’.
