Nanette Carter: An Act of Balance

Press Release

January 25 – March 10, 2018

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present An Act of Balance, an exhibition of recent works on Mylar and paper by African-American artist Nanette Carter. This is her first solo show at the gallery. The reception is on Thursday, January 25, 6-8pm. The artist will be present.

Nanette Carter?s recent work continues her long-standing commitment to the exploration of a completely personal and original style of abstraction whose true significance lies not merely in formal arrangement but in the spiritual meaning that fuels the intangible ideas around human nature while simultaneously meditating on the current state of affairs in society. She takes pleasure in highlighting the zeitgeist of the last five years in an attempt to reconcile contradictory human imperatives. While the age-old questions of balance or justice still remain a part of the global human experience, we are also confronted with the continuing advances in technology, keeping up with social media, working two or three jobs, seeing a lack of civility in our culture and a news cycle that is in over-drive. Her work speaks eloquently to the balance that we all must find in our lives.

Since 1997, Ms. Carter has worked on frosted Mylar ? an archival plastic surface first used by architects in the late 1950s. She uses oil paint, oil sticks and pencils on collaged Mylar to create subtle but intriguing works with rich surfaces imbued with luminosity, density and transparency. In her mind?s eye, she sees herself more as a builder especially when one considers the scale of many of her collages. The act of bringing pieces together to create a substantial work is what fascinates her most as an artist. Included in Carter?s series ?Cantilevered? ? an architectural term where a projected beam is supported by only one end ? becomes a metaphor of the human body with arms out balancing all our responsibilities and information. In the series ?The Weight?, she eloquently speaks to the pressures that continue to weigh us down. ?With Grace and Aplomb?, 2017 evinces mastery of the nuances of color and composition, a deep sensitivity to texture combined with rich aesthetic sensibilities that offer the viewer a freedom of imagination, interpretation and emotional responses.

Nanette Carter was born in Columbus, Ohio, and spent most of her childhood in Montclair, NJ. She earned a BA from Oberlin College in 1976 and an MFA from Pratt Institute of Art, Brooklyn, 1978, where she is currently an Associate Adjunct Professor. She has exhibited extensively both at home and abroad including in Perugia, Italy; Osaka, Japan and London, England. She is included in the landmark travelling exhibition Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today ? a survey of African-American female Artists who create abstract works, organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, presently on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, and will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida in May 2018. Upcoming exhibitions include Afro-Sentinels, a solo show at the Museo National de Bella Artes, Havana, Cuba in September, 2018. She is in several private and public collections including the Montclair Museum, New Jersey; The Studio Museum, New York, Newark Museum, NJ, Pennsylvania Academy of Arts, Philadelphia, PA; St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, Zimmerli Art, Museum, Rutgers University, NJ, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT and the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.