Floral Hex
Nicole Duennebier, detail from Hothouse Bouquet with Spider, acrylic on panel
On view February 27 - April 16, 2021
You can find the price list for Floral Hex here.
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Floral Hex - A Closer Look - artist talk with Nicole Duennebier
13FOREST Gallery is pleased to present Floral Hex, a series of new paintings by Nicole Duennebier and her third solo exhibition with the gallery.
Nicole Duennebier’s signature approach to painting is grounded in her appreciation for the history of art. A casual glance at her work will immediately suggest various historical references, from the Old Masters and Dutch still lifes to Rococo landscapes. However, the true pleasure of experiencing her paintings comes from closer observation, which reveals the remarkable ways that Duennebier learns from and transforms those historical influences to create something truly contemporary and compelling. In her latest body of work, Duennebier draws on intense study of seventeenth century still life painter Abraham Mignon to delve into a subject matter that is historically ubiquitous but new to Duennebier – flowers.
The decision to address a subject so traditionally associated with beauty and femininity was a difficult one for Duennebier. She never wants to provide her viewer with too much pleasure; her previous bodies of work seamlessly meld the beautiful with the grotesque, offering a viewing experience defined by both attraction and revulsion. This new work marks a departure from the pseudoscientific fascination of her earlier work with biologic forms and processes such as rotting and the growth of mold. In Floral Hex, the beauty of her subject matter is instead complicated by the emotional underpinnings of the paintings, which present scenes of isolation and incongruity.
While Duennebier’s previous solo exhibition View into the Fertile Country expanded her scope to landscape for the first time, in Floral Hex she turns her focus to interiority, both in terms of location and psychology. Fascinated with the idea of out-of-place memorials, Duennebier began painting delicate floral wreaths, creating mysterious shrines within claustrophobic caves or deserted landscapes. The abandoned wreaths evoke mourning, but in the absence of mourner or mourned the scenes become a strange melodrama. Her Hothouse Bouquet paintings are both ethereal and peculiar, with squashed flowers and fluorescent pink insects, while in another still life she pairs diaphanous blossoms with piles of glistening dead fish.
In Duennebier’s latest body of work, beauty is always tempered by something unsettling, be it a waiting spider web, a slimy pile of meat, or an encroaching cave with a narrow exit. Duennebier calls upon the knowledge of historical masters to achieve her ambitious textural and compositional effects, imbuing their techniques with her own anxieties and preoccupations in order to cast her Floral Hex.
Preview Floral Hex
Floral Hex - A Closer Look: Artist Talk with Nicole Duennebier
About the Artist
Nicole Duennebier was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1983. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Maine College of Art with a major in painting. Her BFA thesis work was most influenced by research into the coastal ecosystems of Maine. In 2006 she was awarded the Monhegan Island Artists Residency. On the island she continued her work with sea life, and perceived a natural connection between the darkness and intricacy of undersea regions and the aesthetic of 16th-century Dutch still-life painting.
In 2008 Duennebier moved to the Boston area, and now lives and works in Malden. She is a 2016 Massachusetts Cultural Council Painting Fellow and her work can be found in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and New Britain Museum of American Art. Writing about Bright Beast, her 2013 solo show at the Lilypad in Cambridge, Cate McQuaid of the Boston Globe said Duennebier’s “technical mastery gives the artist what she needs to seduce the viewer; the content lowers the boom.” Duennebier has also been featured in the Portland Press Herald, Art New England and Hi-Fructose Magazine, among other publications.
Duennebier has worked alongside her sister Caitlin Duennebier for a number of collaborative exhibitions, most recently Temple of Flies at Montserrat College of Art. In 2018, she was featured in a solo exhibition, Pushing Painting, at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University. Her first solo show at 13FOREST, The Great Season, ran from January through March 2014. An interview with the artist from that time by gallery co-owner Jim Kiely can be found here. Duennebier's second solo show at 13FOREST, View into the Fertile Country, ran from May through July 2018. Read what gallery director Caitee Hoglund wrote about the concurrent exhibitions at 13FOREST Gallery and Brown University here.