“Nava’s energy and the slow reveal of looking, his thinking in paint, are nothing less than a new vision, a new freedom.”
—Mark Beasley
Caught mid-flight, thrusters ablaze and gathering speed in a black void, in T-LC1 American artist Robert Nava presents us with an inventive, futuristic character, creating modern mythologies imbued with momentum and action. With an urban aesthetic and gestural immediacy, the New-York based artist works outside the aesthetic and methodological parameters of his formal training. Instead, Nava’s approach is more intuitive, embracing error and irregularity to engage with material ranging from ancient sculpture, horror films to the popular culture of his youth.
Working with the pulsating pace and energy of techno or house music that fills his studio, Nava currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Born in 1985 and raised in East Chicago, Indiana, his father was a steelworker, working as a craneman while his mother was a receptionist who encouraged Nava’s drawing by bringing home computer paper from the office. Graduating with a BFA at Indiana University Northwest in 2008, to bolster his graduate school application Nava continued for an extra term while working three jobs to support his tuition. It was during his MFA at Yale on the East Coast that Nava encountered new approaches like artist Peter Halley: for Nava discussing art with the Neo-Conceptualist painter was ‘like taking with a Jedi’.
After his time at Yale, for eight years Nava drove trucks and moved furniture to support his creative practice in New York. Ferociously engaging with art at any free moment, Nava explains ‘during my time off I would paint for a nine-day stretch in the middle of the month’. Influenced by the gusto and verve of Philip Guston and Cy Twombly, this primal, raw energy and unconscious mode of mark-making pervades in T-LCI as Nava mechanises acrylic, oilstick, and graphite on canvas to generate new icons for our contemporary moment.
- First exhibited in 2019 as part of Robert Nava's inaugural exhibition with Night Gallery in Los Angeles, T-LC1 demonstrates the unbridled imagination and stylistic flair inherent to the artist's practice.
- Nava's work has been exhibited internationally in a range of solo exhibitions, including at Sorry We're Closed, Brussels (2020); Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York (2021); and Pace, Seoul (2023).
- Now represented by Pace, examples of Nava's work are located in significant public collections internationally, including the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
