James Cohan is pleased to present The Mythic Age, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptural interventions by Naudline Pierre, at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location. This is Pierre’s second solo exhibition with James Cohan.

Transformation is the central tenet of Naudline Pierre’s practice: evolution of the self, metamorphosis of the female form, escape from our earthly existence into the luminous unknown, and material oscillations from fresco-like dry brushing to aqueous gestures. Pierre paints scenes that are ever-shifting, in states of mystery and ecstatic potentiality. Her characters’ limbs and wings extend beyond the picture plane, as if to suggest that this atmospheric world, devoid of a horizon line, continues infinitely.

Pierre absorbs, borrows from, and reinvents disparate art historical references that span centuries, pointedly looking back to artists who did not and could not imagine her as their viewer, yet share a desire to reinvent and reimagine the universe. In her newest works, Pierre references Baroque and French academic painting of the 1800s, which opened the door to modernity and the heretical embrace of iconography in the service of personal, political, and radical self-expression. She draws freely from this distinctly male, European legacy of image-making, forming an intergenerational line between artists of radically different backgrounds to refashion historical motifs for a new audience.