Join The Watermill Center to explore our latest exhibitions, featuring works by American artists Christopher Knowles and Robert Nava.
Christopher Knowles / STAND presents a comprehensive exhibition of Knowles’s work covering a broad range of his artistic career from the 1970s through today, including drawings, typings, paintings, sculpture, and sound work. This exhibition is the result of an in-depth two-year examination of Knowles’s vast archive that revealed many new associations, bodies of works, and approaches providing a unique and highly comprehensive insight into Knowles’s artistic oeuvre. Highlights include groups of work that have never been exhibited publicly–including 1970s typings and paintings–as well as new paintings and sculpture.
Robert Nava / STAND features contemporary drawings and animations by Inga Maren Otto Fellow Robert Nava, inviting visitors to engage with the works within the artist’s studio space. The exhibition will include new works on paper made during his residency at The Watermill Center, which will be complemented by additional recent works. Robert Nava’s work embodies a new kind of mythmaking, drawing from mythology, philosophy, religion, and ancient history as well as video games, monsters, and the animal kingdom.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
All attendees must be fully vaccinated, and present proof of vaccination during check-in. Those unable to show proof of vaccination will be turned away. For the foreseeable future, unvaccinated children are unable to attend. Masks are required indoors.
Please arrive 10 minutes early to allow for the check-in process.
The Watermill Center is committed to providing accessible programs and services for all patrons and artists with disabilities. For further information about any accessibility issues or needs, please email us at info@watermillcenter.org.
photo copyright Lindsay Morris
ABOUT THE ARTSITS
Christopher Knowles (b. 1959) is an American multidisciplinary artist who works in poetry, painting, sound art, performance, and sculpture. Since the early 1970s, he has remixed visual and sonic material from popular culture to create vibrant new vocabularies that expand our understanding of information systems. His work pushes into the gaps between language, sound, and the visual image, creating a hybrid, reparative method of communication that blends the concrete and the abstract. Knowles’s work has been exhibited in many solo and group showings internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Musée Galliera in Paris, the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and the Tate Modern, London. Beginning in the early 1970s, Knowles collaborated on the creation of a series of theater works staged by the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds under the direction of Robert Wilson. He wrote the libretto for Wilson and Philip Glass’s 1976 opera “Einstein on the Beach.” A book of his typewriter poems, “Typings 1974-1977” was published by Vehicle Editions in 1979. In 2015, the Institute for Contemporary Arts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia presented a retrospective exhibition of his work titled “Christopher Knowles: In a Word.” His 2012-2015 solo performance “The Sundance Kid is Beautiful with Christopher Knowles” was presented at the Louvre Museum, the Whitebox Gallery in New York, and the ICA, Philadelphia. His poetry has been published in a variety of magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Interview, and Office magazines. Knowles’s two and three-dimensional works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Watermill Center, and numerous other institutional and private collections. He lives and works in New York City.
Robert Nava (b. 1985, East Chicago, IN) received a BFA in Fine Art from Indiana University as well as an MFA in Painting from Yale University. His practice centers on large-scale paintings and works on paper that portray whimsical creatures, rendered through gestural markings. Finding inspiration in the art of the distant past, from Medieval Christian imagery to Mayan and Sumerian art, as well as popular contemporary sources such as animation, Nava creates compositions that are carefully considered yet marked by a sense of naivete and spontaneity. His art has been exhibited in various solo exhibitions both domestically and abroad, including Bloodsport (2022) at Night Gallery, Robert Nava (2021) at Pace East Hampton, Robert Nava (2021) at Pace Palm Beach, Robert Nava: Angels (2021) at Vito Schnabel Gallery, and Robert Nava (2020) at Sorry We’re Closed in Brussels. Robert’s work is in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and Zuzeum Art Center, Riga, Latvia.
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