Work
Biography
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NIKOLA NIKOLA
Nikola Nikola is a multi-disciplinary artist working in painting, printmaking, drawing, watercolour, sculpture, photography, installation and poetry. Collected mainly in North America, Nikola’s work has been showcased in many exhibitions over the past thirty years, establishing him as one of Canada’s most accomplished living artists. A study of his work from the 1980s onward illustrates an allegiance to expressive figuration. As the critic Donald Brackett wrote of Nikola’s work of the early 1990s:
Nikola is, I believe, certainly an expressionist. Not a “new” expressionist but a real one, using authentic emotional content within a classic gestural mode: human figures burned by the colour of their own arrival in the framed area of the canvas. The combat commences, the audience winces, but stares on nonetheless. The space of each picture is again a mirror of the space we live in, are trapped in, struggling to depart from.
Nikola’s expressionism initially manifested in a neo-surrealist idiom, providing a background philosophical field for mapping forces that are often less than benign in shaping our relations to one another. His figures are often shadowed, or assaulted, by spectral proxies from the world of institutional power but also legion in the domestic sphere: our greed for gain and pleasure, our need for power over others (especially those we purport to love), our fervor to violate and kill.
His work in the later 1990s incorporates a bolder weighting of abstract properties, signalling a decisive shift in focus to the mystical plane. If there’s one definitive conflict or experience consistently offered in Nikola’s art, it usually manifests in the thinnest air of human perception, the boundary or edge world between the temporal and the celestial, the existential tightrope on which maintaining one’s balance depends on addressing the larger questions: Who or what are we? Where are we going? These and other questions are answered in Nikola’s work as representations of cosmic forces that simmer in our blood, often without a conscious voice, but directing us all the same.
In Event Horizon (2008), Nikola forges into new creative territory that reflects his commitment to critical self-examination and to dynamically externalizing philosophical insight into contemporary art. The works of sculpturally-constructed objects in this show – much like his previous sculpture exhibition, Lunchbox Remains (1996) – are atavistically engaging, made of tactile substance, and in this instance incorporate or simulate materials such as wax, felt, bone, ashes and reclaimed wood and metal, all transfigured by shamanistic force, but also mournful responsibility. He has long associated human depravity with our degrading treatment of animals and the natural environment – not unlike Joseph Beuys in that isolated respect.
In Event Horizon, Nikola pushes his art to its riskiest extremes in attempting to excavate new meanings from a radically innovative convergence of fine art forms and disciplines. In his artist statement for the show, he writes:
Event Horizon is an exploration of sculpture as a compressible surface that unifies geometric and topological information, creating a multi-dimensional dynamic among converging aesthetic forms – in painting, drawing and poetry – that together breathe with emotion, intellect and mysticism. In the topologies of these sculpturally-constructed objects, the material reality of constantly shifting space gives every point of interplay its own neighbourhood, its own unseen forces applied to dismantling received truths for taking control of the fiction-fabricating inner space.
In Event Horizon, Nikola is addressing questions that construct us, that turn us into us. In so doing, he charts the visceral marrow of consciousness, the structure of what makes us – at least in moments of contemplation – real. At the same time, his art is disciplined by a guiding modesty, a first principle: that we are all subject to laws of the universe we can’t remotely conceive never mind control. In that sense, Nikola fuses grand ambition with the humility that comes from knowing that we while can be victims or victors in our earthly struggles, in the joy and pain that we bring to one another, we are also pawns to the monstrous unknowability of our cosmic fate.
Recent Solo Exhibitions by Nikola Nikola
2004 Legitimacy of Poem, works on mylar,
Han Art, Montreal
2001 Enfolding Boundaries, watercolours, ArtCore, Toronto
1999 Laparoscopic Travels Through Genetic Memory, large oils with sculptural attachments, Rose Rongits Contemporary Art, Montreal
1996 Lunchbox Remains, sculpture, Rose Rongits, Toronto
1996 Retrospective, City TV, Bravo
1995 Clocks Are Ringing, installation, Rose Rongits, Toronto
1994 Body and Spirit, large oils with sculptural attachments, Rose Rongits, Toronto
1992 Recent Works on Paper, Rose Rongits, Toronto
1992 New Paintings, Luba Bystriansky Gallery, Toronto
“For me, the canvas is the stage, the battleground that provides fuel for an embryo to develop – to breathe with life. My materials are wood, metal, copper, wire mesh, wax, bones and skin. My techniques are weaving, polishing, drawing, painting and writing.”
Nikola Nikola is a multi-disciplinary artist working in painting, printmaking, drawing, watercolour, sculpture, photography, installation and poetry. Collected mainly in North America, Nikola’s work has been showcased in many exhibitions over the past thirty years, establishing him as one of Canada’s most accomplished living artists. A study of his work from the 1980s onward illustrates an allegiance to expressive figuration. As the critic Donald Brackett wrote of Nikola’s work of the early 1990s:
Nikola is, I believe, certainly an expressionist. Not a “new” expressionist but a real one, using authentic emotional content within a classic gestural mode: human figures burned by the colour of their own arrival in the framed area of the canvas. The combat commences, the audience winces, but stares on nonetheless. The space of each picture is again a mirror of the space we live in, are trapped in, struggling to depart from.
Nikola’s expressionism initially manifested in a neo-surrealist idiom, providing a background philosophical field for mapping forces that are often less than benign in shaping our relations to one another. His figures are often shadowed, or assaulted, by spectral proxies from the world of institutional power but also legion in the domestic sphere: our greed for gain and pleasure, our need for power over others (especially those we purport to love), our fervor to violate and kill.
His work in the later 1990s incorporates a bolder weighting of abstract properties, signalling a decisive shift in focus to the mystical plane. If there’s one definitive conflict or experience consistently offered in Nikola’s art, it usually manifests in the thinnest air of human perception, the boundary or edge world between the temporal and the celestial, the existential tightrope on which maintaining one’s balance depends on addressing the larger questions: Who or what are we? Where are we going? These and other questions are answered in Nikola’s work as representations of cosmic forces that simmer in our blood, often without a conscious voice, but directing us all the same.
In Event Horizon (2008), Nikola forges into new creative territory that reflects his commitment to critical self-examination and to dynamically externalizing philosophical insight into contemporary art. The works of sculpturally-constructed objects in this show – much like his previous sculpture exhibition, Lunchbox Remains (1996) – are atavistically engaging, made of tactile substance, and in this instance incorporate or simulate materials such as wax, felt, bone, ashes and reclaimed wood and metal, all transfigured by shamanistic force, but also mournful responsibility. He has long associated human depravity with our degrading treatment of animals and the natural environment – not unlike Joseph Beuys in that isolated respect.
In Event Horizon, Nikola pushes his art to its riskiest extremes in attempting to excavate new meanings from a radically innovative convergence of fine art forms and disciplines. In his artist statement for the show, he writes:
Event Horizon is an exploration of sculpture as a compressible surface that unifies geometric and topological information, creating a multi-dimensional dynamic among converging aesthetic forms – in painting, drawing and poetry – that together breathe with emotion, intellect and mysticism. In the topologies of these sculpturally-constructed objects, the material reality of constantly shifting space gives every point of interplay its own neighbourhood, its own unseen forces applied to dismantling received truths for taking control of the fiction-fabricating inner space.
In Event Horizon, Nikola is addressing questions that construct us, that turn us into us. In so doing, he charts the visceral marrow of consciousness, the structure of what makes us – at least in moments of contemplation – real. At the same time, his art is disciplined by a guiding modesty, a first principle: that we are all subject to laws of the universe we can’t remotely conceive never mind control. In that sense, Nikola fuses grand ambition with the humility that comes from knowing that we while can be victims or victors in our earthly struggles, in the joy and pain that we bring to one another, we are also pawns to the monstrous unknowability of our cosmic fate.
Recent Solo Exhibitions by Nikola Nikola
2004 Legitimacy of Poem, works on mylar,
Han Art, Montreal
2001 Enfolding Boundaries, watercolours, ArtCore, Toronto
1999 Laparoscopic Travels Through Genetic Memory, large oils with sculptural attachments, Rose Rongits Contemporary Art, Montreal
1996 Lunchbox Remains, sculpture, Rose Rongits, Toronto
1996 Retrospective, City TV, Bravo
1995 Clocks Are Ringing, installation, Rose Rongits, Toronto
1994 Body and Spirit, large oils with sculptural attachments, Rose Rongits, Toronto
1992 Recent Works on Paper, Rose Rongits, Toronto
1992 New Paintings, Luba Bystriansky Gallery, Toronto