Ním Daghlian: Redescription

February 15-March 25, 2024

Opening reception Thursday, February 15, 6-9pm at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop

Ním Daghlian ❧ Redescription

Presented by Grapefruits at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop

Grapefruits is pleased to present Redescription, an exhibition of drawings and paintings by Ním Daghlian, in the rare book room at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop. In his delicately rendered oil paintings and impastoed graphite drawings, Ním builds mysterious composite images extracted from the dusty canons of Western art history. In the “Distant View” series, the backgrounds of religious paintings are examined as sites of fantastical play and abstraction within an art tradition literally dictated by scripture, while paintings of flowers find unexpected freedom in superficial adherence to rigid conventions. Surreal fragments of hands, textiles, and other objects float silently together in drawings thick with reflective graphite paste, as though the junk of history had gained sentience through centuries spent languishing in the dark and airless cabinets of the past. The works in Redescription are part of Ním’s ongoing research into the latent spaces of European painting traditions, where gestures of individuality can be found living within even highly formalized and codified forms. In contrast to the dominant art historical narrative that artistic freedom was born alongside Modernism, these works look for the subtle ways that artists of the distant past expressed emotion, imagination, and even resistance within their craft. Ním’s compositions emphasize the tension between the human love for categorization, delineation, and rules, and the inevitable decay and disorder that accumulates through the passage of time. 

Ním Daghlian is an artist, writer, and musician based in Portland. His work is inspired by the minutiae of history, the analysis of creative thinking systems, and the sensory qualities of art making processes. He attended the Glasgow School of Art in Glasgow, Scotland, and has been awarded residency fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Morris Graves Foundation. He has exhibited paintings and installations internationally, including the second Glasgow International biennale, and at local galleries including FalseFront, ExtraOrdinary, Worksound, and Nationale. From 2009-2015, Ním ran an event series called Research Club. He is the author of The Theory of Conceptual Labor, a book about systems of creative work.