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India Nielsen




Nielsen works across a variety of media. Rooted in painting, her works are primarily concerned with language as an imperfect communicative, emotive and representational tool. For her, growing up alongside the internet felt like living inside of an interactive cubist painting, where a multitude of viewpoints, time periods and vastly different subject matter are flattened and pushed right up against your immediate experience. Playing video games as the way you could toggle between two different viewpoints. Nielsen works are quite disorienting and holds both microscopic and macroscopic viewpoints together.

Nielsen also combines text and landscape painting together a process of remixing she was influenced by the techniques of music producers such as Aphex Twin, Frank Zappa and Kanye West. Titles are often word scrambles, chosen for their assonant, emotive qualities and rendered abstract, or created with an online word generator. The bodies/figures in the paintings are also modular and customisable. Body parts are reduced to an outline, made transparent and penetrable, limbs are dissected and used as structural pillars, propping up the architecture of the painting, while others are turned into surreal, absurdist, anthropomorphic symbols. The physical choreography of the works’ installation extends and plays with this idea.

Nielsen (b. 1991, London, UK) lives and works in London. She studied BA in Fine Arts at The Slade School of Fine Arts and completed an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art. Her first solo exhibition, Seer Kin Lives, took place at Jack Bell Gallery in London in 2016. She was in a two-person exhibition at Platform Southwark (London) in 2020. She has been involved in group exhibitions at Eastside Projects (Birmingham), The Hockney Gallery, Gallery 46, The Horse Hospital, Tripp Gallery, Matt’s Gallery, Limbo, The Peckham Experiment Building (London), Assembly House (Leeds) and Im Labor Gallery (Tokyo). India was awarded The Villiers-David Bursary, Royal College of Art (2017) and The Steer/Orpen/Charles Heath Clarke Bursary, The Slade School of Fine Art (2016). India recently undertook an apprenticeship with the artist Ida Ekblad in Norway and was chosen as a recipient of the a-n arts Writing Prize 2019.

www.indianielsen.com
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