12th OCTOBER - 20th NOVEMBER 2021

Text by Juergen Dehm

In her first exhibition at Darren Flook, the London-based artist India Nielsen presents a new body of work she has created in recent months.

India Nielsen's paintings blend subjective experiences with elements from the popular culture of the 1990s and 2000s. For the artist, both areas are closely linked: Growing up, she worshipped female superstars like Mariah Carey and Madonna, and was fascinated by rappers such as Eminem or the Wu-Tang Clan and their tough, confident lyrics. This tension between her desire, the yearning for closeness, which can lead to over-identification, and an abrupt, aggressive rejection to (re)create distance to protect herself, pervades her latest paintings.

The visual sampling and remixing that Nielsen pursues in her works can also be traced back to pop, electronic and hip-hop music. Her specific technique of layering and blending, however, makes it clear that, in contrast to the rigid cuts and analogue samples of vinyl DJs – and despite Nielsen’s choice to paint in oils – she is a child of the Internet and digital communication. Years ago, she began to build up a digital archive, which constitutes her source material and contains images, screenshots, and photos of artworks, comics, manga, or texts, downloaded from the Internet. The decisions as to which templates to use for a painting are often mood-dependent and instinctive.

The exhibition title "M is for Madonna, M is for Mariah, M is for Mother" makes it perfectly clear how significant female pop stars are for Nielsen. But there is another dimension to the sequence in the title when read as a reference to female saint figures associated with Catholicism. As a child, Nielsen, who was raised as a Roman Catholic, was particularly fascinated by the supernatural and magical abilities that the saints in the Bible possess. It is the ritualistic aspects of Catholicism and not religion per se that Nielsen is interested in. The duality of suffering and redemption that defines Catholicism, however, can also be found in some of her paintings: The "sacred heart" for example, one of the pivotal symbols of the Catholic Church, representing Christ's love for humankind that he showed through his suffering on the cross, is a motif Nielsen has been dealing with for a long time and which already appeared in her early works. In her recent paintings, a heart is divided, a toadstool is broken apart in the middle, and a human heart sizzles in the focussed sunlight under a magnifying glass. Somewhere else, two capybaras in love find each other under a rainbow. In “Hey Britney (you say you wanna lose control)” the spheres of star cult and hagiolatry overlap. While the writing declares confidently "We can do hard things", the nimbus of the Madonna is pierced by knives, and her tears deprive the sentence of its impact. 

For Nielsen, who also writes and conducts interviews with other artists, the relationship between text and visual imagery plays a central role. Often it is the texts from opposing fields such as rap music and canonical literature that inspire new work. Writing in her paintings can serve to express clear statements or to make references in coded form. In some paintings, for example, calligraphic letters are scattered across the entire picture plane but refuse to form decipherable semantics at first glance. Instead, their materiality creates a specific texture on the surface, opening up a haptic dimension within the image.

India Nielsen sees her paintings as vessels in which her inner life, her memories, feelings, and projections can be inscribed and unfold. In her sleep, the artist often experiences intense dreams that subsequently enter the fantastic worlds of her paintings. She develops an intimate relationship with the characters she creates with brush and paint, which is comparable to the idolisation that adolescent India felt for Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, or the members of the Wu-Tang Clan – and whose activities she followed on the Internet and MTV (Music Television). Beneath the colourful, playful surface that her paintings have at first glance, Nielsen is concerned with balance, with equilibrium. The balance between intimacy and distance, in India Nielsen’s case particularly between the very personal on one hand, and the templates, taken from the cold digital world on the other, is for her also a quest for balance between the subjective and the universal. Thus, she creates an independent visual language in her paintings that was highly shaped by personal experience, but which is easily comprehensible in individual parts, as these have become part of the recent pop-cultural memory.

 

India Nielsen (b. 1991 in London) studied at The Royal College of Art (2016-18) and Slade School of Fine Art (2012-16) in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Crybaby at Imlabor in (Tokyo) in 2021 and RedivideR at Platform Southwark (London) in 2020. She has been involved in recent group exhibitions at White Crypt Project Space, Collective Ending (London) and Spazio Amanita x Avant Arte (Florence) in 2021 and at White Columns, curated by Danny Baez, (New York), Roman Road, The Residence Gallery and Southwark Park Galleries, Collective Ending, The Residence Gallery, ASC Gallery, The Hockney Gallery, Gallery 46, The Horse Hospital, Tripp Gallery, Matt’s Gallery, Limbo, The Peckham Experiment Building (London), Assembly House (Leeds), White Columns (New York), Spazio Amanita (Florence) and Im Labor Gallery (Tokyo). India was awarded The Villiers-David Bursary, Royal College of Art (2017) and The Steer/Orpen/Charles Heath Clarke Bursary, The Slade School of Fine Art (2016).