Nunu Fine Art New York is pleased to present Weightless, Jill Downen’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, with works spanning six years of the artist’s career. The exhibition will feature over thirty wall-hanging plaster and concrete works that Downen refers to as “reimagined drawings.” Refined by decades of work with large-scale sculptural installations, Downen’s ‘drawings’ echo their architectural interventions through a reduced and sophisticated color palette, unconventional techniques, and their seasoned skills with plaster, concrete, lapis lazuli, and gold leaf. Each artwork is made with lath-and-plaster or metal mesh and concrete, evoking the traditional wall construction methods with common building materials. This reference to building alludes to Downen’s longstanding interest in architectural spaces and their psychological nature. A critical event in their formative years, a lightning strike to the family home, imprinted a heightened awareness of the body, architecture, and temporality that would, in time, inform the core of their artistic practice. Downen mines their own emotional capacities to draw out the materials’ potential, resulting in unique plaster textures and smooth concrete surfaces interrupted by discerning lapis lazuli inlays and gold-leafed contours emerging from the grayish-whitish ground base.

Each drawing creates its own abstract space, and together, they orchestrate a reflective and grounding environment conducive to observation and introspection. These spaces are dedicated to the renewal of balance, the recovery of the horizon, and the restoration of equilibrium. Downen’s nuanced drawings invite us to cultivate our perception and contemplate with the hope of transcendence. The exhibition invites viewers to a haptic experience with spatial poetry, breathing in and out, to find respite in quiet subtlety. Their conceptual motivation addresses the need for quiet reflection in an uncertain world of rapid change.