Nicola López

Stolen Sky 2, 2020
Cyanotype on paper
21 x 19 inches

Stolen Sky 4, 2020
Cyanotype on paper
21 x 28 1/2 inches

Stolen Sky 6, 2020
Cyanotype on paper
22 x 28 1/2 inches

“In cyanotypes a photosensitive emulsion is activated by ultraviolet rays. The touch of the sun brought this blue into being, recreating the sky on this paper. Fences formed in the absence of light: conjuring and limiting the sky in one gesture, creating space and holding it out of reach.  

To steal the sky: through brute force? environmental catastrophe? politics of exclusion? by capturing a combination of time, air, and sunlight, locking them into the fibers of paper?”

Nicola López’s work in drawing, printmaking, site-specific installation, sculpture and video explores and reconfigures our human-built landscape. It positions architecture and urban structure as ever-accumulating evidence of our human aspirations and failures. Drawing on anthropology, architecture, urban planning, and historical and fictional explorations of utopia/dystopia, the work points to deep connections, rifts, and intertwinings between our human-constructed world and systems and cycles of nature.  It is especially concerned with how we navigate the this landscape as we face the global and human-induced crisis of climate change. 

López’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City.  She currently has installations and other work up at The Albuquerque Museum, The Kimball Art Center (Park City, UT) and the Boise Art Museum (Boise, Idaho).