David Nolan Gallery

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to announce Unpacked, Chakaia Booker's third solo exhibition with the gallery. At our new location in Tribeca, we turn to the full breadth of media Booker has mastered, alongside the rubber-tire sculptures for which she is best known. The exhibition brings together freestanding and wall sculpture, from the intimate to the monumental; multilayered collaged works on paper, a practice she has maintained since 2009; a tapestry born of one such work; and a series of photographs that invite the viewer to see what the artist has seen. For more than four decades, Booker has cut and contorted rubber tires into abstract form, a practice that began in the 1980s, when she first took note of tires abandoned after street fires around the city. The material has held her attention ever since. Her work considers two things at once: a contemplation on consumer culture and industrial excess, and a more sensible act of tires pulled from landfills, where they would otherwise sit for years releasing methane as they decompose. Where Booker’s sculptures are starkly monochromatic, her works on paper are vivid, colorful, densely textured, and richly layered, much like the way the artist adorns herself. Booker is rarely seen without an intricately wrapped headdress, a fashion signature that traces back to her earliest forays into wearable art. Booker began working with printmaking techniques in 2009, alongside master printer Phil Sanders at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Her collaged works on paper follow the same modular logic as her sculpture, and she has reshaped how a generation of artists approach chine-collé, transforming a technique once used to support an image into the very method of building one. In this process, thin sheets of variously colored and textured paper are laid onto the printing block, becoming translucent as they draw together into what appears as a single surface. Booker has described this translucency as being central to the tactile, layered feel of the work, and notes its close association with her sculpture practice. She tears and cuts these delicate papers by hand, combining them into their final forms, and works at a scale she credits to printers willing to work past the usual constraints of the process. A single work on paper may hold several hundred individual pieces, at times layered with woodblock embossing, and a single composition can take her more than six months to complete. Booker has described an affinity with Blackburn's own practice of returning to a composition years later, cutting into old woodblocks and remaking them anew. She works in much the same spirit, still printing from blocks first cut in 2009, discovering new configurations within them. Printmaking, for Booker, offers another way of seeing and helps her express another perspective. It’s So Hard To Be Green, 2000, a monumental sculpture, on view earlier this year at the National Gallery of Art, sits in the main gallery: its blackened, mural-like mass embodying the transformation of rubber into something that feels alive. Smaller wall pieces greet visitors at the entrance, each one proof of Booker's ability to draw expression from a material so inert, regardless of scale. Much of what is on view appears in New York for the first time: these sculptures, several recent collages, and the Grave Yard Series in its entirety. Grave Yard Series comprises of twenty-two photographs, each a deliberate composition staged by the artist, retracing her search for raw material through the urban and industrial landscapes of 1990s New York. The images were shot in an abandoned graveyard in Queens, caught mid-transition — most of its graves relocated, a handful remaining, the site reduced to a dumping ground, a salt storage lot, a place people simply walked through. Booker made the photographs while gathering material for The Observance (A Fragmented Beaded Banner) (1995), her first hanging sculpture, and they now stand as a kind of parafictional backdrop to that work. In this work, Booker becomes both subject and artwork, drawing the viewer into the very process by which her material was first found. Taken together, the exhibition traces the range of the artist’s practice across media where each form is distinct yet carrying the same creative signature that is recognizably Chakaia Booker. Unpacked coincides with several major milestones for Booker. On October 29, the City of Akron dedicated a monumental new public sculpture by the artist at Lock 3, overlooking the Ohio and Erie Canal, in a city long known as the Rubber Capital of the World. Organized with Curated Storefront and the Ohio & Erie Canalway Coalition, the work Transit (2026) marks Akron's first major contemporary outdoor sculpture by a woman artist. On Governor’s Island, Brick House (2015) is on view outdoors at Colonel Row through 2027. And at Socrates Sculpture Park, marking the park’s 40th anniversary, Chakaia Booker returns as an alumna artist with three monumental works, Serendipity (1998), Gridlock (2008), and LIKE (2009), on view through April, 2027. The artist’s works are also on view in Grounds for Sculpture, New Jersey; Karl Stirner Arts Trail, Pennsylvania; Cincinatti Art Museum, Ohio; and in Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park, Ohio.

David Nolan Gallery is delighted to present Alice in the Land of Violence, an exhibition of drawings and paintings by Valerio Adami from the 1960s, a period of great international success for the artist, whose work was highlighted at the Venice Biennale, and at Documenta III. Adami returns to New York City after nearly twenty-five years, and we are honored to present his work. The exhibition brings together a body of work created between 1962-1967, before Adami arrived at his signature graphic, hard-edged style. Raw and exuberant, these works move between fantasy and reality, embracing the postwar era’s high fashion, automobiles, and commercial culture. The exhibition takes its title from one of the works on view. Adami was born in Bologna in 1935, a city that gave rise to the Western world’s oldest university and to a legendary culinary tradition, and that also helped birth Italian cinema and industry alike – but a city also scarred by extensive Allied bombing during the war, and by eruptions of Fascist violence against student-led movements during the Years of Lead. The artist’s parents were musicians, and he grew up surrounded by music alongside his brother, a filmmaker who worked with Fellini and remained a lifelong collaborator. Some of Adami’s most playful works integrate this tension of beauty and upheaval. In 1955, Adami moved to Paris, entering a milieu that would shape him indelibly: close friendships with Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam, and a wider circle of serious writers and thinkers that included Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino, and Jacques Derrida. Matta’s deconstruction of conventional form spurred something already forming in Adami’s own mind, and like Matta, Adami turned to surrealism and imagined landscapes as a way of working. A 1962 trip to London brought him into direct contact with Graham Sutherland, Jim Dine, Francis Bacon, and William Scott, and into close conversation with Richard Hamilton. With Hamilton, Adami shared an interest in the intersection between culture and technology, and a collage-like approach to layering images. That same London trip introduced sound into Adami’s work for the first time, as onomatopoeia borrowed from comics and the music of Bruno Maderna and Luciano Berio also began entering his work. Around this time, Adami and his wife, the artist Camilla Cantoni, settled at Villa Cantoni on Lake Maggiore, which became a gathering place for Derrida, Édouard Glissant, Carlos Fuentes, among other artists and intellectuals, where Adami set up the atelier central to this body of work. There is a stillness in his paintings which position the viewer as a kind of voyeur, watching a scene unfold, an atmosphere that shared something with the cultural unease Alberto Moravia was writing about at the same time. The intellectual curiosity and rigor he has always brought to his work, and his insistence on freedom of ideas, make him stand out in postwar Europe and remain relevant today. Adami’s style of the 1960s connects to American Abstract Expressionism and to French cloisonnisme seen in Gauguin’s masterpieces — named after cloisonné, the metalworking technique which uses delicate wire to partition colored enamel — evoking the density and structure of Gothic stained glass. Flat fields of saturated color, bound by precise black outline, fragment bodies and objects and reassemble them into images that feel figurative and abstract at the same time. The resemblance to Pop Art’s thick lines and unshaded color — the vocabulary Roy Lichtenstein and, later, Peter Saul each drew from comic books in their own ways — has led some to place Adami within that movement. He rejected the comparison outright. “I always vigorously refused the appellation of pop,” he told Carlos Franqui, a Cuban poet, journalist, prominent revolutionary, and a friend of Adami’s, insisting instead on a practice rooted in literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophical inquiry — what is now known as “Narrative Figuration.” Poetry and balance are ever-present in his works. The directness and simplicity of his paintings give the viewer unobstructed access to sensation, and open as many interpretations as there are viewers. Coming of age in postwar Italy also sharpened Adami’s suspicion of power and his conviction that freedom of thought was essential to art, a conviction that found its fullest expression in his major work Intolerance. This visual language was built on early training in Felice Carena’s atelier, a formative encounter with Oskar Kokoschka in Venice, and formal study under Achille Funi at Milan’s Accademia di Brera. Blam (1962), subdued and near-abstract, marks this early period; and in Auto-Lavaggio (1967), we see how the blues and purples of his mature palette fully arrive. The hotel room recurs throughout Adami’s work as a site of psychological tension — a studio of convenience for a nomadic artist, but also a space thick with memory and isolation, assembled poetically. “For years, I painted in hotel rooms,” he recalled. “I needed the anonymity of a place of passage to reinvent the possibility of a studio.” His interiors hold anonymous, fragmented figures, their stories energized by a second presence or a suggestive title — a rawness typical of his 1960s style, in which disparate cultural artifacts are thrown together. Adami’s interest in psychoanalysis, and in how mechanical objects shape desire, extended to these rooms as spaces of isolation and detachment. In the mid-1960s Adami made his first trip to New York, staying at the Chelsea Hotel and befriending Allen Ginsberg and Saul Steinberg; it was the city’s underground scene — its writers, poets, and musicians, and not its Pop scene — that drew him in. Cars run as a parallel theme through the decade. An avid enthusiast who enrolled in Pietro Taruffi’s high-speed driving school in 1963, Adami included automobile imagery into his paintings and drawings, often naming works to evoke the sound of an engine. The car became a symbol of freedom and detachment, of fragmented identity and mechanical sexuality. Drawing has remained central to Adami’s practice throughout, whether in his exquisite, sophisticated graphite works on paper or in the way line structures his paintings — a strong compositional element that carves the picture plane into fields of positive and negative space. His drawings unfold like a stream of consciousness, memories flowing across the sheet with something of James Joyce’s collage-like sense of accumulation. As Adami has put it: “Line is a manifestation of thought.” In the decades since, Adami has extended this sensibility into murals and large-scale public works made for community rather than gallery or museum, realized all over the world from Paris to Tokyo. His high-low sensibility and surrealist inheritance can be seen today in artists from William Copley to Carroll Dunham, KAWS, Dana Schutz, Philip Guston and Peter Saul.