December 10–January 7, 2022
Steve Turner is pleased to present Eutierria, a solo exhibition by Bianca Nemelc that features the interconnectedness of watery landscapes and the female form in a series of new paintings. The exhibition’s title is a term coined by Australian philosopher Glenn A. Albrecht, and it refers to “a positive feeling of oneness with the earth and its life forces where the boundaries between self and the rest of nature are obliterated and a deep sense of peace and connectedness pervades consciousness.” This is the feeling that Nemelc seeks to convey in her paintings and in the immersive installation that she designed together with guest curator, Ché Morales.
Bianca Nemelc (born 1991, New York) has had recent solo exhibitions at Woaw Gallery, Hong Kong and Hashimoto Contemporary, New York. This is her first exhibition at Steve Turner, Los Angeles. Ché Morales is a New York-based independent curator.
Curatorial Statement by Ché Morales, Guest Curator
Visitors will step into a room evocative of a riverside or lake: deep blue walls, trickling music, green ferns lacing up alongside a dock from which visitors view Nemelc’s figurative nudes. The immersive form of the exhibition room allows for the intimate proximity of a lover or friend gazing upon a woman bathing. Nemelc is known for painting Black and Brown women at ease in their bodies, and Eutierria continues this tradition while remolding the long fraught history of women in paintings caught bathing unawares.
In an era filled with all sorts of competing ideas about how Brown and Black women should be represented, Nemelc’s paintings escape such representational burdens, an especially impressive feat when one considers their nudity. Despite the intimacy of the paintings—close ups of breasts and buttocks and swinging legs—the figures maintain an introverted ownership over their bodies. They are never preening for an outside gaze. They’re just being themselves. This is what makes Eutierria, at surface an escapist exhibition, about that most political of subjects: human freedom.
Nemelc was born and raised in New York City, where her great love for water began at the Hudson River, a place she grew up visiting to escape the city and connect with nature. Nemelc writes of the Hudson:
It outlines the west side of New York City before meeting with the great Atlantic Ocean to trade stories carried back uptown in its currents. This love sits sandwiched between the experiences of water as my home before birth and every other time I’ve encountered the ocean afterwards. Each meeting is familiar but shockingly new. No river or ocean stays the same and so, we are left reintroducing ourselves to an old friend with every encounter. This new body of work is a love letter to the fear, curiosity and rebirth that is offered by water.
Eutierria’s immersivity invites visitors to join all that is made possible by Nemelc’s vision of water, conveyed in the artist’s own words as “that idealistic world where you can float in the water and there is not a care in the world.”
Born 1991, New York
Lives and works in New York
Solo Exhibitions
2022
Eutierria, Steve Turner, Los Angeles
Austral Summer, Hashimoto Contemporary, New York
2020
As It Ripens, Cheryl Hazen Gallery, New York
And Then She Grew A Garden, Cheryl Hazan Gallery, New York
2019
Small Comforts, Ross + Kramer Gallery, East Hampton
Group Exhibitions
2022
Untitled, Miami Beach (with Steve Turner)
LUSH, Hashimoto Contemporary, New York
2021
LUSH, Hashimoto Contemporary, New York
Art Miami
Contemporary Domesticity, Taylor Grahne Projects, London
De Lo Mio, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Brooklyn
2020
Somebody, Hashimoto Contemporary, San Francisco
NADA, Miami (with Assembly Room)
New Wave, Anna Zorina Gallery, New York
Drawn Together, Unit Gallery, London
LES Crib, Shin Gallery, New York
The Joy of Art, Assembly Room, New York
The Pearl, Ramp Gallery, London
2019
A Bronx Tale, segundo capitulo, LatchKey Gallery, Bronx
NOMEN, Phillips, New York
Art Jakarta, Indonesia
Spring/Break Art Show, New York (with Ross + Kramer Gallery)
Residencies
2020
SILO6776, Artist in Residence, New York
Bibliography
2021
“Bianca Nemelc: Soul of the Earth,” Juxtapoz, January
2020
“As It Ripens: Bianca Nemelc’s Celebration of Body @ Cheryl Hazan Gallery,”
Juxtapoz, October
“Bianca Nemelc Is Painting the Fantastical World She Wants to Live In,” Hypebeast, July
