David Nolan Gallery

About the Gallery
Founded in 1987 in SoHo, David Nolan Gallery specializes in modern and contemporary works by an array of international artists, from different generations and cultures, working in a variety of media. The gallery’s original mission was to showcase contemporary works on paper along with painting and sculptures by American and European artists, and to produce monographs alongside tightly curated historical exhibitions. The first solo show at the gallery – an exhibition of early drawings by Sigmar Polke - was followed by presentations of now-canonical German artists, including Georg Baselitz, Martin Kippenberger, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Richter, Hermann Nitsch, Rosemarie Trockel and Albert Oehlen. In this same period, the gallery began showing works by major American artists including William Copley, Carroll Dunham, Fred Sandback, Al Taylor and Barry Le Va.

In 1993, David Nolan Gallery had its first exhibition with Richard Artschwager, which was succeeded the following year with a show of work by Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. In the late 1990s, another two key American artists were introduced to the program, Jim Nutt and Peter Saul. Further growth was marked by the inclusion of New York-based artists Mel Kendrick and Steve DiBenedetto in the mid-2000s, at a time when the gallery also began working more closely with the Estate of George Grosz.

In 2007, David Nolan Gallery mounted an important survey of contemporary Romanian art, which included work by Adrian Ghenie and Gabriela Vanga, alongside Ciprian Mureşan and Şerban Savu, both of whom continue to work with the gallery. The following year saw the gallery’s expansion and relocation to its new location in Chelsea, a move that was inaugurated by a major Artschwager exhibition along with the addition of gallery artists Julia Fish, David Hartt, Jonathan Meese, Wardell Milan, and Jorinde Voigt in the coming decade.

David Nolan Gallery has continued to build on its reputation of showing leading international artists, adding Dorothea Rockburne in 2020, and announcing its newest location on the Upper East Side, inaugurated in Spring 2020 with an exhibition of new works by Jorinde Voigt and the gallery’s fourteenth solo show of Barry Le Va. In 2021, the Estate of Rodrigo Moynihan joined the gallery, followed by Brazilian painter Paulo Pasta, whose first show at David Nolan Gallery marked the artist’s first solo presentation in all North America. In 2022, American artist Chakaia Booker joined the program.

About the Presentation

David Nolan Gallery & Marc Selwyn Fine Art:
David Nolan Gallery and Marc Selwyn Fine Art will present work by Rodolfo Abularach in a solo presentation at Independent 20th Century. Born in Guatemala, Rodolfo Abularach (1933–2020) is one of Latin America’s most distinguished artists, renowned for creating a deeply spiritual and psychological visual language centered on the eye as a portal to the soul. Over a career spanning more than six decades, he explored themes of perception, mystery, and the natural world through a remarkable range of styles, from hyperrealism to abstraction. This presentation brings together works from the 1950s through the late 1980s, including oil paintings and ink-on-paper drawings that reveal the breadth of Abularach’s artistic vision. Surreal imagery permeates the exhibition, from meticulously rendered eyes to more abstract forms that evoke eclipses, volcanoes, and cosmic phenomena. At a moment when questions of perception, consciousness, and humanity’s relationship to larger natural and celestial forces feel especially relevant, Abularach’s work offers a strikingly contemporary perspective, underscoring the enduring power of his singular artistic vision.

David Nolan Gallery & Gió Marconi:
The Obsessive Image, a collaborative presentation by Gió Marconi and David Nolan Gallery, explores the recurrence of images, forms, and artistic preoccupations across twentieth-century art. While repetition is one manifestation of obsession, the exhibition considers a wide spectrum of obsessive artistic behavior: the return to a single image, motif, or medium; the meticulous refinement of craft; the accumulation of forms over decades; and the compulsive need to investigate an idea beyond conventional limits. Bringing together Italian and European artists with art of the Americas, the presentation reveals connections between formally and conceptually distinct practices from different generations and cultures, tracing how obsession, in its many forms, becomes a mode of seeing as much as a way of making.

In a culture defined by progress and acceleration with the relentless circulation of news, images, the pressure of markets, and the obsessive measurement of time and productivity, the artists in this exhibition offer a different proposition: that to return to the same image, or form, or the same question or concept, is a very meaningful way to move forward. Artistic obsession slows time. This presentation makes the case for that paradox.