Nick Modrzewski in Homo sacer: life unlawed at La Trobe Art Institute

We are pleased to share Nick Modrzewski is exhibiting in Homo sacer: life unlawed at La Trobe Art Institute which is currently on display until 7th May.

Curated by Modrzewksi and Jack Ky Tan, this exhibition explores the idea of homo sacer (literally, ‘sacred man’), an ancient Roman legal idea that a person who has been removed from and placed out of the law and society, or from whom law has been withdrawn, could be killed without consequence.

Installation view, Homo sacer: Life Unlawed, La Trobe Art Institute, 2023, Images courtesy Leon Schoots

Through a group of sculptures, paintings and video artworks, the Homo sacer: life unlawed exhibition demonstrates how the law is not only embedded in (our) bodies, but creates the particular sense of material and social reality that we perceive in the everyday world.

Both Tan and Modrzewski are artists with legal backgrounds who make work at the intersection of art and law. The idea for this exhibition emerged from Zoom conversations between Tan and Modrzewski over a two-year period as a self-organised digital residency.

For Nick Modrzewski, this exhibition brings together four years of artistic and legal research. Practicing as both a barrister and an artist, Modrzewski’s daily life is deeply entangled with the law. The questions and experiences he encounters in his professional life are filtered into his art practice. Emerging as densely layered paintings where he depicts figures enmeshed in legal processes or bureaucratic systems: naked neighbours wrestle over a fencing dispute, a congregation of medieval noses gathers to draft legislation and mortgage brokers sing songs about home loans.

Installation view, Homo sacer: Life Unlawed, La Trobe Art Institute, 2023, Images courtesy Leon Schoots

… as artists with legal backgrounds, we’ve noticed that law is like a fabric or fluid, a ‘shadow world’ that underpins society. Like if society was a body or machine, law would be the DNA or the code that dictates how that body or machine is to be performed or activated.

Nick Modrzewski in conversation with co-curator, Jack Ky Tan.

While I was making this painting, I was thinking about crowds – throngs of people, objects, animals and hybrids of all three. Where does one body start and another body end? Individual subjectivity can almost merge in a crowd. You have the many individual people who make up the crowd, who may have committed specific crimes. But who is responsible for the collective intention of the group and can those intentions be attributed to its specific members?

Nick Modrzewski

The law struggles to cope with merged subjectivities because it needs to find a specific legal subject in order to attribute responsibility. You can’t sue a horde of people in a court of law, you need to pluck out individuals.

Jack Ky Tan

So I’m painting this mucky, fluid scene where bodies are almost conjured out of a nebulous muck of abstraction and it’s hard to tell the individual from the whole. Things are swampish, murky and almost uncategorisable.

Nick Modrzewski

Detail of Nick Modrzewski, Homo Sacer, synthetic polymer paint on board with Oregon frame, 193 x 383 cm, 76 x 150 3/4 in

In each of his scenes, Modrzewski picks apart the rules of social engagements, rendering them in a sensuous and fluid painterly language. An abiding interest in narrative, theatre and absurdity define the tone of Modrzewski’s works, which also encompass sculpture, text and performance.

For Modrzewski masks embody the theatrics and performance of modern day law – its absurdity, construction, and practice. These sculptures explore how the law uses ‘masking’ to construct an elaborate fictional universe, populated by characters who are written into existence during legal disputes. Like characters of a play, plaintiffs, defendants, debtors, creditors, judges and legislators all act their parts in both the real and imagined processes of law.

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 Discordia (Melbourne); First Draft (Sydney); the Institute of Contemporary Arts (Singapore); Blindside (Melbourne); Fort Delta (Melbourne); KINGS ARI (Melbourne); OH Open House (Singapore); and the Australian High Commission (Singapore). His writing has been published by Running Dog; Art & Australia; Monash University Museum of Art; un Magazine; Writing & Concepts; the Lifted Brow; Fireflies; VRE Books and The Research Handbook on Art and Law. Modrzewski is a board member of West Space.