STATEMENT

I am an installation-based painter using realism as a way to explore the sculptural qualities in painting. I am interested in the long tradition of illusionistic painting, not only in regard to subject matter, but in how an image itself exists in its own pictorial world while simultaneously taking up and relating to the viewer’s physical space. My paintings activate the architecture they are in — the walls, floor, and ceiling play a direct role in the viewer's experience. One piece often consists of multiple canvases, making an interactive environment created uniquely by paintings.

My subjects — ranging from banal to culturally significant: still-life, place, symbol, myth — are always life-sized, representational with neutral white backgrounds, and are unframed. The paintings are displayed to spatially mimic the subject’s actual existence: hung up high, flat on the ground, partially or completely hidden, protruding out from a wall, etc. This makes the paintings object-like: viewers must walk around them, squat down, search for them around the exhibition space, see all sides, or sometimes even touch them. My work disrupts traditional ways of viewing and encourages people to look at painting not just with their eyes but with their whole body.



BIO

Lara Nickel (b. 1985, American-French) was born and raised in New Mexico. She is an installation-based painter and published author whose work articulates painting’s slow historical slide down and away from the wall. She has produced distinctly experimental projects, from monumental-sized exhibitions to guerrilla-style art interventions, each designed to underscore an audience’s direct physical contact with a painted illusion.

Nickel is most well known for her large-scale painting project, 12 Horses — Homage to Jannis Kounellis, which was first exhibited at Museum Fondazione 107 in Turin, Italy in 2019. Skira (Milan) published a hardcover, trilingual book (featuring the late renowned art critic Germano Celant) on her work in 2022. Her book is in the collections of the Getty Museum Library, the Metropolitan Museum Library, and the historic Museum + Library l’Inguimbertine in France, among others.

Nickel has been invited by curator Rosa Martínez to present 12 Horses in the upcoming Malta Biennale 2026, where it will be shown entirely in its own venue — at The Stables of the Grand Master’s Palace in Valletta, one of the largest of all the Biennale’s exhibition sites.

Nickel is currently based in Santa Fe, NM where she teaches drawing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is represented by Nedra Matteucci Gallery.