Nasher exhibition reveals deeper side of Dallas artist Nic Nicosia

For those who first became acquainted with artist Nic Nicosia’s work during his first peak of international recognition in the 1980s and 1990s, “Everyday Surreal,” the Nasher Sculpture Center’s survey of 70 works made during the most recent quarter-century of his career, gives a broader and deeper sense of his art.

It answers the nagging question that confronts hitmakers in every field: How can you follow up great success?

Born and raised in Dallas and a graduate of the University of North Texas, Nicosia participated in exhibitions such as “Documenta” and the “Whitney Biennial” throughout his early career, and earned a retrospective exhibition that traveled between 1999 and 2000 to Houston, Dallas, Austin, El Paso, San Antonio and Cleveland.

During the 1980s and 1990s, artists such as Cindy Sherman, who used staged photography to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, captured the spirit of the age by suggesting how elements of shared reality are socially constructed. Known as the “Pictures Generation,” this cohort of artists provided the most influential context for Nicosia’s art at that time.

Two aspects of Nicosia’s recent work in particular, as highlighted in the Nasher show, contrast with the earlier period.

First, since the 2010s, Nicosia has been making sculptures to be exhibited on their own (rather than only as props for photographs), as well as drawings. Second, there is a subtle but persistent concern with mature themes relating to family, illness, mortality and the passage of time.

If some of the rhetoric surrounding the Pictures Generation could give the impression that the world is nothing but a network of social constructions, by contrast, Nicosia’s recent work is shaped by its contact with reality — famously defined by the author Philip K. Dick as “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Some of the sculptures, such as the Dreamboats series originally made as toys for Nicosia’s future grandchildren, have a sense of dreamlike imagination shared with his photography. However, the medium of sculpture also makes possible a new sense of permanence. 

Bighands, an eight-foot-tall stainless steel self-portrait, as well as The Twins, originally installed on the Katy Trail, began as footlong Paperclay models, before being enlarged to monumental size.

Nicosia’s drawings, which can be placed into the category of conceptual art, seemed to me to show most poignantly how any attempt to capture the fullness of lived experience through measurement or quantification is doomed to failure. 2190 #5, a nine-foot wall drawing, refers to the number of days that elapsed between when the artist first felt unwell, and the date of his lymphoma diagnosis in 2013.

Similarly, Every Day-All Day is composed of 18,400 pencil strokes — one for each second of the day. The Drive From Santa Fe To Dallas 77 Times includes one line for each time Nicosia made that 650-mile trip during a decade of living in New Mexico.

One of the fun games that a viewer can play while taking in the show, is to try to spot some of Nicosia’s favorite motifs as they appear differently in various works. For example, the magnolia is significant: Magnolia was his mother’s family name, and the flower is also a symbol of the American South. Magnolias appear both in a delicate-looking biomorphic sculpture, Breathing Magnolias #1 and in a drawn self-portrait, I Am Magnolia #2, where the artist’s face peeks out from behind the top of the flower.

While expanding into sculpture and drawing, Nicosia has continued to make the staged photography for which he has long been known. Despite his achievements in other media, I still found the photographs to be the most memorable works in the show, in their uncanny ability to conjure other worlds.

In the year 2013, around the time of Nicosia’s cancer diagnosis, he made staged photographs including Aggregates and Whatwhyseriously, both belonging to the series called Stories.

Unlike his earlier photo series, which required large crews and life-sized sets, the Stories used tabletop-sized dioramas and models to create other worlds. Aggregates shows Nicosia looking over his shoulder at a six-headed “monster of self-doubt,” while the three figures in Whatwhyseriously (which was also turned into a sculpture) represent a trio of reflective questions.

At a similarly intimate scale, the series In The Absence Of Others, including works such as Circle Of Possibilities and Concentration In Bits uses small homunculus-like figures (including the one that was enlarged to become Bighands) to represent internal states of mind.

Being made at life size, and blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, the works from the early 2020s in the Homemade Stories series are most reminiscent of Nicosia’s earlier work. In these, the imaginary creatures appear to colonize the kitchen, living and dining rooms of his own house. A home’s natural sense of privacy and security (which creates a particular sense of unease when it’s changed without warning) makes these works especially compelling.

Substantial as it is, the Nasher show can present only a sliver of the prolific artist’s recent work. A concurrent exhibition at the Erin Cluley Gallery is replete with additional examples of many of the same series, giving an even fuller picture of his output

Benjamin Lima is a Dallas-based art historian and the editor of Athenaeum Review, the University of Texas at Dallas journal of arts and ideas.

“Nic Nicosia: Everyday Surreal” continues through Aug. 16 at the Nasher Sculpture Center, 2001 Flora St., Dallas. Open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 214-242-5100, nashersculpturecenter.org.

“Nic Nicosia: a little more” is on view through Aug. 1 at Erin Cluley Gallery, 150 Manufacturing St., Suite 210, Dallas. Open Wednesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. and by appointment. 214-760-1155. Free.