Avery Z Nelson
Avery Z Nelson makes bold, colorful paintings that explore the feeling of being in a body.
Each painting has its own strong color palette, from which hands, arms, breasts, and faces emerge, intertwining as if from one and many bodies simultaneously. In Nelson’s compositions, insides become outsides and outsides insides, as architectural spaces that defy physics make space for bodies that defy traditional binary understandings of gender. Painted in bright, metallic palettes, their work combines figurative, abstract, and symbolic visual language, examining the resulting contradictions, fragmentation, and tension of juxtaposing divergent forms of representation. Most recently, Nelson has been working on a series of paintings about the (im)possibility of fully inhabiting their own fluidly gendered body; a body that exists outside of the constructed, normative, male/female binary.
New York, NY
Born 1983, Rhinebeck, NY
2009 MFA Columbia University, New York, NY
2006 BA Barnard College, New York, NY
2005 Norfolk Program, Yale University, New Haven, CT
www.averyznelson.com