Columns

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Columns, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of works by Ned Colclough. The exhibition, installed in the gallery’s upstairs location, comprises eight new sculptures configured across an industrial carpet floor.

Hybridizing structural and decorative applications, a column is an architectural element that transmits, through compression, the weight of elevated structures to those below. As a visible conduit for continuous, unseen forces traveling between contiguous materials, the column – conceived of equally as form and order – lends itself as an effective syntax through which to read the artist’s acutely nuanced lexicon of tangible significations.

Sustaining an improvisatory and lyrical parsing of material culture, Colclough’s sculptural assemblages orchestrate a mutually-informing dialogue between found and fabricated forms extracted from their ordinary distributions. Keenly attuned to generic substances that threaten to slip below the threshold of identification as designed artifacts in the aftermath of Modernism, Colclough manipulates diverse woods, fabrics, paints, and metals towards conditions of formal equilibrium, condensed allusion and oblique figuration. Throughout, palette, surface, scale and proportion are suspended in varying interrelations and intensities—reconciling precise internal cadences with the broader rhythms of historical formation.

Ned Colclough earned his BFA from the NSYCC, School of Art & Design in Alfred, NY. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in private and public venues including: the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR; Wallspace, NY; Dodge Gallery, NY; The Brooklyn City Pavilion, 9th Shanghai Biennial, curated by Cleopatra’s, Shanghai, China (traveling); Zieher Smith, NY; Sara Meltzer Gallery, NY; Printed Matter, NY, and in curated exhibitions by Apartment Show. He is a recent recipient of the 140 Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.