ART CITIES: London-Tammy Nguyen

Tammy Nguyen creates paintings, drawings, artist books, prints, and zines that explore the intersections between geopolitics, ecology, and lesser-known histories. A story teller, Nguyen’s multidisciplinary practice takes two forms—her more traditional fine arts practice, which encompasses her lush, dense paintings, as well as her prints, drawings, and unique artist books, and her publishing practice, embodied through her imprint, Passenger Pigeon Press, which creates and distributes Martha’s Quarterly, a subscription of artist books and interdisciplinary collaborations.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive

Tammy Nguyen presents “A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio”, her first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. Featuring new paintings, works on paper, and a sculptural artist book, this is is the second exhibition in a three-part series based on the “Divine Comedy”, Dante Alighieri’s cmasterpiece of Christian literature. Nguyen’s multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections between geopolitics, ecology, and history, using narrative to intertwine disparate subjects through artmaking. Across her mediums, Nguyen’s work aims to unsettle, and the tension between her elegant forms and harmonious aesthetics often belies the nature of her storytelling. She probes this contrast between form and content by confusing the visual plane, which she achieves by creating intricate visual metaphors nestled within many layers of diverse material. Nguyen works with watercolor and vinyl paint, repeatedly obscuring and revealing her subjects to build friction. In Nguyen’s version of “The Divine Comedy:, Dante’s three epics act as a metaphor for the geopolitics of Southeast Asia during the Cold War. Nguyen constructs narratives that explore the moral gray areas that permeate global history, probing the power language has to shape these ambiguities. Her world building is often ripe with inversion—in Inferno, Nguyen tracked Dante and Virgil’s descent into hell against the Space Race—up is down, day is night, and large is small. In “Purgatorio”, as Dante seeks to purify his soul by ascending Mount Purgatory with Virgil as his guide, Nguyen plots a simultaneous descent into her version of the Grasberg Mine (a project conducted in West Irian, Indonesia from the 1930s–80s). The paintings are united in formal qualities but marked by distinct characters—from statuesque angels appropriated from Gianlorenzo Bernini sculptures, to prehistoric dinosaurs, to a host of international leaders from the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. Nguyen immerses these characters in a lexicon of imagery that sets the scene for her version of purgatory, which takes the form of an island that exists in liminal time and space, each occupant a kind of refugee in an eternal state of waiting. In “Angels Carrying Crosses on Mount Purgatory” (2023), angels ascend the canvas, nocturnal luna moths trace the path of the moon, seashells dot the sky like stars, and ancient fern fronds rhythmically punctuate the picture plane. In “Natural Love is Always Inerrant” (2024), Jesus Christ arrives by boat to the shores of purgatory, bearing a crucifix; the composition is divided in two, the figure at center framed by sunset on the left and sunrise on the right. During the Cold War, Southeast Asian countries were contending with the anxiety of both looming conflict (augmented by the destruction wreaked by the atomic bomb in Japan) and their new sovereignty. Here, ancient monsters reference this kind of existential and ever-present menace. In several paintings, including “Love Can Never Turn its Sight” (2024) and “What Sin is Purged Here in the Circle Where We are Standing?” (2024), prehistoric dinosaurs emerge from and retreat into the surrounding fauna. Nguyen’s dinosaurs allude to one monster in particular—Godzilla, whose depiction first developed in 1950s Japan. In this way, the dinosaurs in Purgatorio reference the continued threat of atomic warfare and serve as a vehicle for the address of traumas past. The exhibition culminates in a large-scale artist book entitled “Mine, Purgatory” (2024), which ittakes the form of a mountain and opens inwards like a mine. With each turn of the page, the reader descends into the mountain, growing closer to the center. The pages themselves contain excerpts from both the Bandung Conference and Dante’s cantos in “Purgatorio” Nguyen manipulates the stanzas to create her own idiosyncratic translation, which becomes increasingly complete as one reaches the end of the book. As the cantos conclude with Dante’s discovery of his true love, Nguyen’s reader approaches the center of the mine, and treasure is unveiled: at the base of the book is the golden imprint of a dinosaur foot.

Photo: Tammy Nguyen, Spears Pointed, 2023, Watercolor, vinyl paint, pastel, screen printing, rubber stamping, and metal leaf on paper stretched over wood and gator board panel, 65 x 90 inches / 165.1 x 228.6 cm, © Tammy Nguyen, Photo by Daniel Kukla, Courtesy the artist and Lehman Maupin Gallery

Info Lehman Maupin Gallery, 1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 13/3-20/4/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com/