"Nic Nicosia: Real Pictures 1979-1999"
2000-12-09 until 2001-02-04
Austin Museum of Art
Austin, TX, USA

The Austin Museum of Art (AMOA), in collaboration with the Texas Fine Arts Association (TFAA), will present Nic Nicosia: Real Pictures 1979-1999, the first retrospective of this Dallas-based artists career. Featuring more than fifty photographs, three video/film works, and a video installation, the exhibition will be the first comprehensive look at the work of this leading Texas artist to be seen in Central Texas. AMOA and TFAA are located within walking distance of each other on Congress Avenue, AMOA at 823 Congress and TFAA at 700 Congress.

Nic Nicosia: Real Pictures 1979-1999 traces this internationally known artistNULLs fascination with the gap between illusion and reality, especially as played out in middle-class American suburbia. Nicosia uses the paradoxically intimate and mundane settings of the bedroom, kitchen, or backyard as the back-drop for his photographs, but alters them by introducing obviously artificial conventions from movies and television. While he treats the subjects of his colorful narratives and character studies with affectionate humor, Nicosia also reveals darker realities of desire, violence, and isolation that lie beneath the surface of his artificial worlds. Nevertheless, he avoids passing judgment on his troupe of characters, leaving viewers to reach their own conclusions about the values and personas encountered in his works.

ADD ONE / AMOA AND TFAA PRESENT NIC NICOSIA: REAL PICTURES 1979-1999

Nic Nicosia (b. 1951) first attracted national acclaim in the early 1980s for his set-up color photographs in which hand-crafted tableaux, playfully activated by friends and family actors, blurred the definition of the photographers role both before and behind the camera. His early images explored everyday dramas of family life and adult activities in rich, saturated color. Nicosias subsequent work in black and white was moodier and more passionate, tackling the tensions of adolescence, the complexities of young adulthood, and the frustration of middle-age parenthood, with penetrating honesty.

By the mid-1990s, the work had become surreal, and completely manipulated, through the use of dramatic costumes and make-up. A new stage in the artists career is marked by his recent move into film and video, in which the suburban neighborhood and all its quirky characters come alive on the screen. His award-winning films have been shown in festivals internationally and one of his films, Middletown Morning, was featured in the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Nicosias work has been featured in major international exhibitions including Documenta IX at the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany and Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. His photographs and videos are in the permanent collections of MoMA; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Nic Nicosia: Real Pictures 1979-1999 has been organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston and co-curated by Austin Museum of Art Chief Curator Dana Friis-Hansen and Contemporary Arts Museum Senior Curator Lynn M. Herbert.

Related Links:

Texas Fine Arts Association

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of Texas

Other Important Exhibitions in United States