About Nick Mauss

New York, NY

Nick Mauss (CBA ’16) is a visual artist who works at the interstices of different media in relation to drawing. His porous approach to drawing as an expanded form fuses peripatetically to other possible formats, including sculpture, publications, curated exhibitions, writing, and most recently, ballet and poetry. In the 2012 Whitney Biennial, an architectural intervention of cotton brushstrokes appliquéd to velvet walls (transposed from a memory of an encounter with a work by Christian Bérard in the foyer of L’Institut Gerlain in Paris) became a filter through which the genealogies of modern art at the intersection of European and American encounters within the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection could be thought and hung in a new way; an exploded “booth” in an art fair became a multi-tiered stage on which ballet dancers, musicians, and artists performed on the brink of rehearsal, continuously, for five days in a row. He is a graduate of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and teaches in the MFA program at Bard College. Recent solo exhibitions include 303 Gallery, New York; Independenza Studio, Rome; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen; Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis; and MD72, Berlin. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Artists Space, New York; Kunsthalle, Basel; Nouveau Musee National de Monaco; and Mauss was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, and MoMa and PS1’s Greater New York 2010.

Performance, To be titled

Mauss researched and developed a ballet to be realized within multiple frames of reference. Emerging from an interest in avant-garde scenographic painting and the ephemeral, transient, and contingent nature of ballet as a living as well as historical form, this work was performed as an exhibition thrown into porous contact with the live ballet—developing a new form of both exhibition and dance.