Chuck Nanney’s exhibition Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light showcases new large scale and brightly colored unstretched paintings with somewhat musical and whimsical compositions.  Nanney’s early successes were always tied to the associative and formal properties of fabric, either worn by the artist in the form of humble clothes or stretched over raw branches into biomorphic irregularity shaped monochrome canvases. Another slightly later series used loose canvas clipped together in sculptural forms. In his last show in NYC, the gallery was painted bright  pink with lumpy painterly extrusions in gilded rough wood bulging in to the space whose bodily associations undercut their decorative allure.  With this series Nanney brings together most of themes from the past decades, making works that feel both weightless and monumental.

 

Nine major large scale paintings will create a colorful, theatrically playful environment, circuit or astronomical diagrams interwoven with circus tent-like graphics. In the alcove Nanney’s highly seductive wooden shaped works capped with golden phalluses, Tuttle like forms with 

 

About the Artist 

Chuck Nanney (b. 1958, Memphis, TN, lives and works in Oakland, CA) has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe starting in the early 1980’s with recent solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, Fierman, NYC and Jenny’s, Los Angeles.  Prior solo shows include Debs & Co., New York; Galerie Patrick Seguin, Paris; among many others. The famed artist Udo Rondinone is currently organizing a survey of Nanney’s legendary and seminal early work to be presented in New York City during 2021, details forthcoming.

​

Bill Arning Exhibitions 

604 West Alabama 

Houston, TX 77006

​