Now and Away

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the Mexican, Hanover-and Mexico City-based artist, Isabel Nuño de Buen.

The work of Isabel Nuño de Buen is ambitious, not only in terms of scale, but most importantly, in terms in scope. Incorporating sculpture, drawing and installation, she makes allegorical portraits of both the self and human civilization as an ongoing, multifarious and incompletable project. As such, hers is an essentially fragmented practice, which is characterized by a sense of fluctuating open-endedness, and which always gestures toward a much larger, ever-evolving, and unknowable whole.

For her first solo exhibition at Chris Sharp Gallery, Nuño de Buen presents a selection of new works from her ongoing codex series. These discrete, multilayered reliefs bring to mind a surprising heterogeneity of references: three-dimensional palimpsests, maps, marine life, heraldic shields, fungal growths, prehistoric or post-historic artifacts, as well as archeological fragments which could be from either a remote past or not-so-distant future. Consisting of papier maché armatures, which are then outfitted with a variety of materials, they include documents or letters, strips of gauze, dyed textiles, hand-made yarn, sutured drawings on transparent paper, as well as flat or undulating, plate-like segments of glazed ceramics, the whole tied together like gift or a package with string, strips of drawing and gauze. Stacked and condensed, these codices want to be if not literally, then figuratively unpacked. There is the sense that they are conundrums which, if fully deconstructed and studied, would not so much disclose as erase their own mysteries; their semi-inscrutable promise of intelligibility and meaning becoming an allegory of both the self and civilization. Far from literal or didactic, the work, and its multiple, potential significations, plays with and exists on the threshold of comprehension, much like former civilizations and our complete, knowable selves exist on the threshold of our understanding, but ultimately remain just beyond our grasp.

(b. 1985, Mexico City)

Isabel lives and works in Hanover and Mexico City. A selection of solo exhibitions includes Stations, Berlin (two person show with Aimee Parrott) (2023); Sprengel Museum, Hanover; Lulu, Mexico City (2021) Kunstverein Hanover (2020); The 500 Capp Street Foundation, San Francisco (2017); and kurimanzutto, Mexico City (2015). Recent group exhibitions include: WIRE, LINE & STRING, Mai 36, Zurich (2022); Distant Voices, Stereo Gallery, Warsaw (2021/22); Dwelling Poetically: Mexico City, a case study, ACCA, Melbourne (2018); Creación en Movimiento, Fotomuseo Cuatro Caminos, Mexico City; Kunstpreis Junger Westen Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (2017); Creación en Movimiento, Capilla del arte, Puebla; Bricologie, Villa Arson, Nice (2015). In 2024, she will have solo exhibitions at Mai 36, Zurich and ICA, Milano.