Nick Cave has long been a flag-bearer of maximalism even as the art world tended toward minimalism. His Soundsuit sculptures, for which he’s best known, were born out of the 1990s, when issues of identity entered the media spotlight after a series of tumultuous events, including the Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police. After the subsequent LA uprising of 1992, Cave began gathering sticks and twigs to create an armor to protect himself from a world in turmoil. The resulting extravagant costume-sculptures, with their signature contrasting of materials, patterns, and silhouettes, not to mention the concealment of identity markers, exude wonder. Numbering over 500 examples, they have come to represent a new era of contemporary art that refuses to separate the self from the form, forcing viewers to see their interconnectedness.
If the Soundsuits are about protecting and insulating oneself from a world filled with violence, Cave’s new work, now on display at Jack Shainman Gallery’s large clocktower space in the show Amalgams and Graphts, sees the artist himself emerge from his aesthetic camouflage into a more complicated space of visibility that probes relationships of power and image. The metaphor of “serving,” which has specific connotations in queer culture, not to mention the history of labor, is central to these objects. This is a performance coded in queerness and Blackness, among other things, and serves an audience that is versed in those rituals of presentation. Cave has transformed his love of maximalism into verdant objects that freeze time with their undecaying organic forms while infusing each piece with an air of anxiety represented by layers upon layers of dense patterning that are dizzying to parse. Yet, the power he conjures from such intense accumulation has deeply spiritual connotations, as these perpetual gardens of the imagination spring eternal with seemingly endless floral offerings.
In his latest works, Cave has scanned and photographed himself, incorporating both his body and visage into his art. His Soundsuits have morphed into the hardened bronze forms in his Amalgam series, which suggest strength, resoluteness, and power, while the material shift cites art history more directly. In his more two-dimensional Grapht pieces, his portrait is rendered into needlepoint and patched together with dozens of trimmed metal floral trays. When Cave appears in the Grapht pieces, his image is both transformed and partly concealed as he dons items that modify his appearance by plugging into a larger history of representation. In a leather daddy outfit, he exudes a sense of mysterious tension associated with BDSM subcultures; in a gray hoodie, he evokes the murder of Trayvon Martin and the more sinister power of images, as well as their capacity to hijack and destroy. Evidently, Cave is not scared of shadows, or the nightshades in his gardens.
These newer sculptures denote a different sense of time than the movable Soundsuits: they appear steadfast in space, immutable, even resolute in their complication of clear meaning. In “Amalgam (Plot)” (2024), a masterwork of composition, figures appear to hide as tole flowers buttress the forms that lay on the ground. The sculpture’s magnetism directs our attention to its many parts; even if we intuitively comprehend the encapsulated tension between movement and rest, it refuses deciphering. The figures appear to be in a state of transfiguration, further resisting easy categorization.
In the Grapht works, which all frustratingly share a title, time is suggested through the vintage serving trays. Those bygone moments of intimacy and service become trophies, or perhaps relics, that we might imagine as memorials to acts of service.
Each of these renderings reveals a mercurial relationship to power, even if it is imagined or distorted. Using his own image, Cave visualizes himself not as safe and separate from the powerful, as his earlier work appeared to, but as perpetually open to interpretation from his audience.
Unlike the Soundsuits, where the corporal presence is central to the way we confront the art, the forms in Amalgam and Grapht are less direct in stance and scale and give rise to new conceptual outcrops and growths. In both groups of new work, the artist’s own body is scanned and manipulated into forms and images that allude to a vulnerability that the Soundsuits never quite attain. Here, the artist is in dialogue with his own power, and the limitation of images to render memory, and all its complicated historical connotations, into the present.
Nick Cave: Amalgams and Graphts continues at Jack Shainman Gallery (46 Lafayette Street, Civic Center, Manhattan) through March 29. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
