Nino Mier Gallery is thrilled to present Thus Spoke the Rabbit, a group exhibition to close out 2023, the Year of the Rabbit according to the Chinese Zodiac. The Rabbit – associated with elegance and beauty in astrology, with resurrection in Christianity, and with curiosity and escape in more contemporary representations – is a figure that both offers new perspectives on our world and transforms it entirely. Likewise, the paintings, drawings, and sculptures in the exhibition both probe our encounters with nature and with a realm increasingly unlike our own. The exhibition will be on view in Los Angeles and New York from December 2 – December 16, 2023.

Representations of the natural world throughout the exhibition favor the experiential rather than the objective. Nathan Ritterpusch and James Chronister transmogrify their source images – commonplace photographs of flora – into paintings that straddle the line between realism and optical illusion. Tony Matelli, Piper Bangs, and Mai Blanco, in turn, enchant organic materials within their topsy-turvy compositions, often anthropomorphizing the plantlife and objects comprising emotionally-charged landscapes. Michael Bauer and Andrew Dadson’s involute abstractions further disorder natural topographies, reflecting the often disarraying aesthetic experience produced by nature’s grandeur. These artists’ fantastical contrivances reform earthly pastoralia, both through the looking glass and beyond its scope.

Organic materials like wood, burlap, and cotton find new life in many of the exhibition’s more abstract works. In Ethan Cook’s handwoven cotton abstractions, dyed fabrics are juxtaposed while evoking atmospheres like an underwater expanse or the cool, pinkish cast of a winter sunset. Otis Jones’ wood-based wall reliefs and José Lerma’s portraits on burlap emphasize the earthiness of the materials employed in their construction. Together, these renderings both encounter and reconfigure nature’s resources in order to present the world anew. 

While many of the exhibition’s works embody a transformative fantasia through their form and material, others present avatars for metamorphosis. The subjects of Koshiro Akiyama’s romantic nightscape encounter the natural world as an opportunity for solitary contemplation. The abstract, expressionistic work of Liliane Tomasko, Jana Schröder, and Anke Weyer, on the other hand, articulates various liminal states of transformation. The artists’ focus on color and form manifest prelinguistic affective states on canvas or – in Tomasko’s case – reflective aluminum.  

In all, these works call to mind Friedrich Nietzche’s solitary, ambulatory Zarathustra, the titular narrator of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from which this exhibition derives part of its title. The itinerant philosopher ponders the nature of time, spirituality, and power, eventually describing his ecstatic acceptance of eternity, a feeling that Zarathustra voices in song. Zarathustra’s creative act can be seen as an analogy for the artistic process, a practice that requires strenuous isolation in order to produce hopeful, everlasting expression. The paintings and drawings in the exhibition both represent and evince in viewers opportunities for solitary reflection and joyful rebirth.