Nancy Bowen: From A to Z and the Bodies In Between
Nunu Fine Art New York is pleased to announce From A to Z and the Bodies In Between, the first solo exhibition of New York-based artist Nancy Bowen (b. 1955) with the gallery. The exhibition features recent collages and sculptural works that bring together an expansive range of materials, many drawn from nature and the artist’s personal archive. Working with the sensibility of an “artist-archaeologist,” Bowen excavates, recombines, and repurposes these elements to subvert long-held narratives surrounding the female body, craft traditions, language, and history.
Using historical materials as a starting point, Bowen’s collages allow language sourced from text published decades ago to acquire new associations in the present. Since 2015, she has developed a series of collages made from early and mid-twentieth century dictionaries discovered in her parents’ home. Combining materials and techniques associated with both fine art and craft, Bowen removes individual pages for each letter of the alphabet and collages them together, overlays the sheets with geometric patterns, then embellishes them with paper, glitter, and pigment. Words like “naked,” “obeisance,” “taboo,” and “zeal” surface within each composition, revealing no apparent rhyme or narrative. While viewers may instinctively search for a hidden message, Bowen emphasizes visual rhythm and association over literal reading. She has noted, however, that amid a shifting political climate, certain selections have begun to resonate differently for both herself and her audiences. Social and political concerns surface in a process shaped as much by intuition as by circumstance.
Bowen’s three-dimensional works extend her fragmentation of language and history to the body. She initially conceives her sculptures as bodies, gradually departing from that framework as she layers on new materials. Sculptures such as From the Deep, 2024, Sentinel, 2024, and Venus Again, 2022 evoke the female figure through their voluminous and sensuous forms but resist fixed or literal classifications. Conventional sculpting materials, most often ceramic, serve as a structural foundation, while porcupine quills, coral, and beads introduce texture, ornament, and associative meaning. As hand-made and found materials work in harmony and organic, body-referencing shapes co-exist with synthetic matter, normative constructions of the female body are subverted. Bowen’s sculptures make visible the interplay of material, form, and meaning, exploring how bodies—like language—can be reconstructed and reimagined.
What distinguishes Nancy Bowen’s work is her unique ability to not only seek out her own sources and invent her own parameters, but to reconfigure them simultaneously. Across her broad oeuvre, materials are reused and repurposed, words are transformed into images, bodies take on new shapes, and the personal becomes deeply resonant.