Nick Cave Inaugurates Jack Shainman Gallery’s Tribeca Flagship

Running for three months, “Amalgams and Graphts” represents a return for Nick Cave, who took roughly two years off after his Guggenheim retrospective to reflect, assess, and close a chapter in his practice. The show’s title nods to two bodies of work introduced within the exhibition: large-scale, bronze Amalgam sculptures, and Graphts composed of needlepoint pieces affixed to serving trays collected by the artist. 

The magnitude of the Amalgam sculptures anchor the show. Both pieces in the central gallery space play with visitor vantage points, and exemplify a response to repressive societal structures—a continued force within Cave’s oeuvre. Amalgam (Plot) depicts two crumpled bodies on the floor, with each head replaced by the conical shape Cave incorporates into his beloved Soundsuits; conversely, Amalgam (Origin) is a 26-foot-tall figurative work with tree branches and perched animals in place of a neck and head. These reach toward the ceiling and draw one’s gaze skyward. While Plot embodies a conclusion of the current visual language of Cave’s Soundsuit sculptures, which he first debuted in 1992, Origin acts as a rebirth of the concept. 

“The Soundsuit didn’t die, it’s morphed into something else,” Cave tells Surface. This development will allow, he foretells, his pieces to enter a new sphere of visibility. “The Soundsuits are all in museums and private collections. With these pieces, this is me—as I have always been an artist with a civic responsibility—thinking about public space, and asking how everyone can have access to my work.”

Regarding the materiality of the needlepoints and trays that come together in Graphts, Cave explained during a press conference that they’re all “about service, about limitation, about hierarchy. It’s about spilling the tea. It’s about queerness.” After pondering oil painting for three years, Cave stumbled upon needlepoint. “With all my work, especially when I am shifting directions, the most important consideration is the essence. How can I transfer the essence from one body of work into another?” he asks.

The Chicago-based artist says this transformation comes down to care. “Care means commitment. Care means sensitivity. Care means becoming quiet. Those were the things that I thought about on my material exploration,” he says. For him, needlepoint has that care, commitment, and sensitivity “It’s a form of therapy and contemplation,” he shares. “It allows you to do work on yourself as you get quiet. There’s the repetitiveness of the behavior. It allows my head to clear. That’s what we need the most in a world with so much noise.”

Shainman first welcomed guests into the space, located at 46 Lafayette Street, with a preview exhibition entitled “Broken Spectre,” featuring the photographs and large-scale filmic work of Richard Mosse, with a score from Ben Frost. After that limited run, Shainman closed doors and began an extensive renovation. “There’s a grandeur that the space provides,” Cave says. “It’s extraordinary—the ceiling alone with its adornment. Everything in my work feeds off and echoes what’s happening in the room.”

Cave says his work isn’t complete until installation is done. “I think about space as I think about dance. I become a choreographer with the placement,” she shares. “The arrangement is crucial for the work to take position. The piece that goes up first dictates how the rest of the room is calibrated. It’s really about a feeling and where my body is in the space.” Once Amalgam (Origin) was installed, he began to place the others in reaction.

To spend time with each work is to invite a dialogue on the woven nature of pain and beauty. Underneath it all is a sense of reconciliation. “For me as a person of color, there are moments where life reflection is very hard,” Cave says. “When I am experiencing harm on Black and Brown bodies, I am human, I have feelings. At the same time, I have to carry on and find ways to reconcile these ongoing emotions. I am fortunate to have this medium to express myself. It becomes: ‘how do I talk about that’ and ‘how do I come through that with optimism and hope.’” 

Shainman believes “Amalgams and Graphts” to be the ideal introduction to the Tribeca flagship. Its discovery was born from a quest to find a space with volume that could “keep up with the ambitions of our artists and be able to help them realize their dreams,” he concluded, standing among Cave’s pieces. “We never could have imagined it would look like this.”