In her third solo show with Caren Golden Fine Art, Nicola López resumes her investigation of the dizzying complexity of the urban landscape. As in her past efforts, the dynamic, mixed media works in Shadowland feature the industrial components of the labyrinthine modern city. López portrays the city as both a symbol of achievement and failure; sites of colossal engineering, social coordination and interconnectedness; but also anxiety and dislocation.

Nicola López breaks the city down to its nuts and bolts… or rather, its gears, pipes, joints, girders, grates, wires, cables and bolts, and meticulously reassembles it. Put back together, these reconfigured cityscapes offer multiple vantage points, dramatic perspectival shifts and distorted spatial properties that distill the angular intensity of the modern city to a compositional essence. This new body of work takes her in-depth investigation a step further, capturing the decay and emptiness of a mighty city past its prime. This appraisal of the urban condition functions on both a literal and a metaphoric level. López’s process of combining graphite and ink drawings, overlaid with collaged elements, reflects the twisting and snaking components of the city’s interlinked networks. The additive process and arrangement of elements in the service of a greater superstructure reflects the basic mechanisms of urban growth. In Shadowland Nicola López presents both the pared-down, as in her woodcut on mylar “Steel Embrace,” and the built-up, represented by the rising energy in “After the Storm.” The common thread in all López’s work, whether spare or abundant, is the combination of printing, drawing and other reworking that harnesses the possibilities of mechanical reproduction with her unique perspective and sensibility.

Nicola López’s work has been featured in fine art and culture publications including, amongst others, The New York Times, ArtForum, Art in America BOMB and W Magazine. She has participated in numerous international solo and group exhibitions including Phantom Sightings, which originated at the Los Angeles Museum of Art in the Spring of 2008 has traveled to the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, the Centro Cultural Universitario in Guadalajara, Mexico and will open at the Museo del Barrio in New York City in March, 2010, American Soil, the opening exhibition of the Nerman Museum in Overland Park, KS, Future Tense: Reshaping the Landscape at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, NY, Claiming Space at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Gallery of the University of Texas in El Paso as well as the Orpheus Selection exhibition at PS1 in 2007-08. She will have a solo exhibition at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, WI in the fall of 2009, which will travel to the Mesaros Galleries of West Virginia University (catalog). Also upcoming, López’s work will be included in Embrace! at the Denver Art Museum in Denver, CO and Cut Paper Landscape at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.