Aspen Art Museum

Mythic

2024

Oil and oil stick on canvas

96 × 90 in   |   152.4 × 243.8 cm

Kindly donated by Naudline Pierre and James Cohan, New York

Estimate: $80,000–$120,000

About this Work

Naudline Pierre’s work situates personal mythology and transcendent intimacy alongside canonical narratives of devotion. Her works continue the art-historical tradition of portraying encounters between the earthly and the otherworldly, extending this lineage of image-making by injecting the conventions of her discipline with ephemerality and ambiguity. Referencing the Renaissance format of the altar triptych, for example, or incorporating flattened space and forced perspective, she reconfigures formal systems from the past to generate new possible futures grounded in the here and now.

The three figures in Mythic are in states of celebratory motion. Their limbs and wingspans bleed out beyond the edges of the frame, as if to suggest that this atmospheric world, devoid of a horizon line, continues infinitely. Hair is rendered both as a braid of flames and as inky black tendrils whose nearly sentient, anti-gravitational upward movements remind us that we are in a world where rules of nature do not apply. Like antennae, Pierre conceptualizes the hair as a powerful mode of transmission and wordless communication within this ritualistic scene. The flames that swirl around the figures feel similarly dynamic – rendered as dark and sinuous as oil slicks, and in cool tones of desaturated blues and grays, they seem to register both temperature and sensuality, coyly covering and drawing attention to the figures’ nudity.

The pastel, candy-blue sky contrasts sharply with the smokiness of the clouds below. Cherubic, alien beings peer out towards the viewer, acting as guardians who form a lily pad-like structure for the figures above. Traces of Baroque and French academic painting are evident here, as well as a nod to the fantastical scenes of Marc Chagall. In these artists’ work Pierre locates a recognizable expansiveness and make-believe tinged with “an undercurrent of darkness that I feel connected to.

It comes from a need to create not only a world, but an escape.” Pierre traces an intergenerational line between artists of radically different backgrounds that each in their own era search for, and offer to us, a world unknown.

The following text appears in the Aspen Art Museum Summer Magazine 2024

Naudline Pierre’s cast of characters inhabit a parallel world. A peaceful one painted in rich earth tones. Its inhabitants float in a void or huddle together, their bodies entwined in acts of tenderness. Flames whip around them, engulfing them, but seemingly without danger. Many are winged, offering the potential for escape. The images are sensual, but also possessed of a certain innocence. And at their center is one particular female figure, who on occasion the artist has described as her alter ego.

Having found her way into painting through religious art, Pierre has gone on to create her own mythology. In a short film made in 2021 she declared, “I think imagination is so important to survival.” The swirling symbolism of her canvases recalls the work of the British poet and painter William Blake, and Pierre herself has cited the influence of other European masters: Goya, Caravaggio and El Greco. The title of her first solo museum show, “What Could Be Has Not Yet Appeared,” at the Dallas Museum of Art in 2021, conveys the exploration of spirituality that anchors her work. Cited in a 2021 article for W magazine, the curator of the exhibition, Hilde Nelson, explained what she sees to be common to the work of historical European religious paintings and those of Pierre: “At their core, [they] are about faith and the unseen and what lies beyond us—how we can find connection in an uncertain world.”

Born in Leominster, Pierre lives and works in Brooklyn. She was a 2019–20 artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and her work can be found in numerous museum collections, including the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City.

About the Artist

Naudline Pierre’s paintings draw from fantasy and iconography to conjure alternate worlds. Swirling with jewel-toned texture, her works center ecstasy, devotion, and tenderness in epic scenes that generate space for rescue and healing. Pierre’s winged figures are enveloped in vast, horizonless landscapes, where they come together in acts of intimacy and salvation: they reach longingly outward toward each other, congregate, and embrace, emoting protection and care.

Rendered in layers of prismatic-colored washes, the artist’s subjects are limitless and uniquely out of step with time. Cast within stories of sublimation, mercy, and resurrection, their ethereal bodies defy boundaries set by inherited mythology and art-historical precedent. Within these narratives, Pierre inscribes her alter-ego as protagonist—a vessel to explore the infinite future possibilities that can be accessed through imagination and self-possession.

Pierre’s work situates personal mythology and transcendent intimacy alongside canonical narratives of devotion. Her works continue the art-historical tradition of portraying encounters between the earthly and the otherworldly, extending this lineage of image-making by injecting the conventions of her discipline with ephemerality and ambiguity. Referencing the Renaissance format of the altar triptych, for example, or incorporating flattened space and forced perspective, she reconfigures formal systems from the past to generate new possible futures grounded in the here and now.

Naudline Pierre (b. 1989, Leominster, MA) received an M.F.A. from New York Academy of Art, NY, and a B.F.A. from Andrews University, MI. Pierre has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at The Drawing Center (2023) and the Dallas Museum of Art (2021). Pierre participated in the 2019–2020 Studio Museum’s Artist Residency and, as a culmination of the program, exhibited in a three-person exhibition at MoMA PS1. Pierre has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, most recently at Prospect.5 New Orleans, LA; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; the Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; The Dean Collection, Macedon, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; ICA Miami, Miami, FL; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; and the CC Foundation, Shanghai, China.

How to Bid

All lots will be on view at the Aspen Art Museum from July 17 through August 1.

Bidding on this work takes place at the ArtCrush gala on Friday, August 2nd, at 8pm MT. Absentee and telephone bidding available.

Please contact bid@aspenartmuseum.org for more information, including a condition report.

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