Nick Modrzewski

Nick Modrzewski (b.1988, Melbourne) is a New York based artist working across painting, mask-making and text to explore how the human body is affected by abstract systems like law, language and social etiquette. 

In his paintings, Modrzewski loosely records figures in frenetic states of movement, metamorphosis, and social interaction. Fragmented faces and limbs interweave between painterly gestures and grounds, splintering and combusting in the process. Drawing on his previous experience working as a barrister, Modrzewski is particularly interested in how bodies might be elongated or distorted by rules and regulations. Eschewing direct representation and toying with loose narratives, his paintings enact a slippery archive of partially erased forms and hybrid images that toggle between contradictory positions: flatness and volume; construction and deletion; fixture and animation. These dualities are central to Modrzewski’s exploration of painting as a site of improvisation and discovery through a confluence of working methods, characterised by cycles of control and abandon. By layering different techniques on-top of one another and combining multiple art historical precedents, his system of image production eventually lands on dense and complex paintings that speak to the fallibility of rational processes and the malleability of perception.

Nick Modrzewski holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Melbourne. He has exhibited locally and internationally, including at COMA (Sydney); Watch This Space (Alice Springs); La Trobe Art Institute (Bendigo); Monash University Museum of Art (Melbourne); Contour Sculpture Biennial (Canberra); Discordia (Melbourne); First Draft (Sydney); the Institute of Contemporary Arts (Singapore); Blindside (Melbourne).