Nick Mauss born 1980 in New York. He now lives and works in New York and Berlin. In 2003 he went to The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York.
In an article in Art In America by Stephen Maine. The author of this article says "It seems that Nick Mauss loves drawing so much he wants to totally fuck with it."
"He consistently treats drawing not as a class of objects or an activity but as an attitude toward pictorial information that prefers implication to statement, confusion to clarity, the inconclusive to the definite."
Mauss uses different types of media such as drawing, painting, video, sculpture and installation. By using such a different range of mediums he has created an experimental exhibition "that is directly sensitised to both inviting and disconcerting the viewer."
Mauss's exhibition "The Desire for the Possibility of New Images" at 303 Gallery is a landscape littered with sheets of folded and cut aluminum, scattered across the floor and pinned to the walls like a manuscript caught in an updraft. Glazed ceramic, paper, and silk-screened aluminum sheets present tenuous, delicate drawings that appear as if they could easily splinter from the materials that bind them. Silk-screened onto the aluminum surfaces, repeated images and half formed figures reference and annotate one another as one seeks to construct a whole image from multiple fragments. While Mauss employs various forms and media, his drawings are a consistent thread throughout the work.
I love the fact that Mauss's exhibitions are not just the usual piece of paper or canvas displayed on a wall in a frame perfectly level. He makes it his own and leaves a lot of his work just lying on the floor. He uses the whole exhibition space which I feel makes it more interesting.
The relationship between the drawings and photographs is determined by a process of thinking about the drawing as a plan, or an object as a former drawing, whether that is in a pleated and draped dress or in an architectural detail that stands between memories of ornament and function. The images are selected to push against the viewer's drive to identify; they are meant to elicit something else.
I like the way Mauss makes his drawings into sculpture somehow, the way he makes his drawings stand up make the viewer intrigued as it's not the norm. also the way his uses aluminum make the reflections more interesting than the drawings themselves. He makes the viewer want to look for something, as there is so many different aspects to look at, I feel this is because he has used so many different mediums in his work.
There is no correct thing for what Mauss' drawings are, he lets the viewer make up their own mind for what they are seeing.
A wood frame supports a sheet of stretched paper at the entrance of the gallery, a jagged geometric form carved our of it center. This passageway stands as both entrance and barrier.
I really like this piece of work because it looks as though it's incomplete, or he finished this drawing and then destroyed it. A lot of Mauss' work and drawings look incomplete and I feel this adds to his exhibition as again he is letting the viewer be a part of his art and complete the pieces themselves.
One of the striking aspects of Mauss' work is how it embraces belonging to a time it didn't exist in without falling into the trap of nostalgia.
His drawings seem to come from the art academies of another era. Figurative forms drift in and out of focus - a line in a drawing could be someone's arm and back, or it could be a huddle of abstract doodles.
Mauss' drawings are executed with a confident and economic sense of draftsmanship.
Mauss has said he likes drawing "because it's a kind of a secondary medium. Drawings can be casual, humble and simultaneously vague and very direct. A drawing rarely seems to be finished, it is a notation of an idea before it is set in place."
The half-glimpsed and half-remembered are key to Mauss' work.
It would be simplistic to accuse Mauss of hankering after a certain early 20th Century Modernist movement, like so many nostalgic young artists have done over the past few years.
His practice takes the position that the hierarchy of images is not fixed and never could be because our relationship to them is always changing. In this sense, you could say Mauss' work is work in progress.
