Unsettled Horizons: The Expanded Prints of Nicola Lopez
October 25 - November 30, 2024 | Highpoint Center for Print Making
Curated by William Morrow, Independent Curator
The first major survey of the artist Nicola López’s (b. 1975) multifaceted career in print, UNSETTLED HORIZONS: THE EXPANDED PRINTS OF NICOLA LÓPEZ, brings together twenty-five years of engagement with the medium. The exhibition presents the artist’s commitment to exploring the inherent and often overlooked intersection of our built environment and nature, also reflecting on the interconnectedness of our ever-present physical past with the future. Tracing her innovations in self-published work alongside her collaborations with some of the finest master printers and publishers of our time, UNSETTLED HORIZONS highlights López’s unfettered approach to pushing the limits of print. The exhibition includes over 50 editioned, unique prints and installations that utilize various intaglio, explosive, relief, silkscreen, and lithographic techniques on an array of equally diverse substrates.
Drawing from international research and residencies around the globe combined with formal studies in anthropology and fine art, López’s keen powers of observation and expertise in her craft bring to the forefront a world of envisioned possibilities. López suggests her work is often “exploring the way that human-built structures intersect with other systems of nature. Architecture becomes geology, and vice versa. Buildings grow like crystalline structures and eventually return to the earth. Buildings also take on animate qualities, becoming bodies as well as embodiments of social ideals, ambitions, fears, and failures.” Additionally, her work often addresses broader issues of hybridity and relationship to place, reflecting her lifelong relationship with her native New Mexico and her experience as a transplant living in NYC for the last thirty years. López's use of mixed media and intricate detail adds depth to her exploration of these themes, inviting viewers to contemplate the relationship between humans, technology, and the natural world.
The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color exhibition catalogue with an essay and an artist interview by William Morrow.
About the artist:
Nicola López (b. 1975) is based in Sante Fe, New Mexico.
Nicola has participated in several residencies and received grants and awards including fellowships from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Sovern/Columbia Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Her work is held in numerous prominent institutional collections and has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Guggenheim Museum in NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, the Denver Art Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, and the Albuquerque Museum.
Since 2004 López has taught at institutions such as Purchase College, New York University, Cooper Union, Bard College and Columbia University, where she was an Associate Professor of Visual Arts from 2013 to 2024. López earned her MFA and BA from Columbia University.
