Hugo Wilson: Carnal Agreement

Los Angeles

March 26 – April 30, 2022

Hugo Wilson: Carnal Agreement

Installation View 

Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022

Hugo Wilson: Carnal Agreement 

Installation View 

Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022

Hugo Wilson: Carnal Agreement 

Installation View 

Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022

Hugo Wilson: Carnal Agreement 

Installation View 

Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022

Hugo Wilson: Carnal Agreement 

Installation View 

Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022

Hugo Wilson: Carnal Agreement 

Installation View 

Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022

Hugo Wilson: Carnal Agreement 

Installation View 

Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022

Hugo Wilson: Carnal Agreement 

Installation View 

Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022 

Hugo Wilson: Carnal Agreement 

Installation View 

Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022

Hugo Wilson: Carnal Agreement 

Installation View 

Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022 

Hugo Wilson: Carnal Agreement 

Installation View 

Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022

Hugo Wilson: Carnal Agreement 

Installation View 

Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022 

Press Release

There is a supermassive black hole in the womb of the Milky Way, extinguishing and birthing stars and constellations on a timeline so vast that the entirety of human consciousness barely registers. It is the origin and death of time and space and countless planets more or less like ours, where, due to an opportune solar flare or some cosmic chaos butterfly flapping its wings, the magnetic poles were reversed, or the dinosaurs never went extinct, or Hitler was smothered in his crib. If we could see them with our own eyes, these worlds would look somewhat familiar, but our understanding would be tainted by the infrastructure of personal belief here on Earth.

 

Carnal Agreement, Hugo Wilson’s third solo exhibition with Nicodim, views the cycle of life, death, and everything before and after in a spiritual vacuum. This body of work actively undermines hierarchies implemented by one’s tribal affiliation, choice of newspapers, and other carnal agreements initiated prior to conception by geographic and socio-political constructions. Within Wilson’s three large-scale works on paper, black-and-white monoprint massaged by ink, charcoal, and watercolor pastel gives rise to parallel galaxies completely untethered from predetermination. His canvases discover organic bodies in vibrant color: “Carnal Agreement 2,” 2021, is a big bang of open possibility with feathers, fern, and other night fruits finding form; “Carnal Agreement 3,” 2021, is a tsunami of meat and flesh either stripped from the bone or affixing itself to a central ribcage as it awaits divination; “Figment,” 2022, offers a window to a reality in which imagined composites of vanished, sinister avian species are very much alive and well. The viewer is divorced from their body, omnipresent and nowhere in a panopticon with a vantage point that stretches mega-annum. Each piece is a portal beyond the violent carnal agreements that dictate existence as we understand it.

Hugo Wilson (b. 1982) lives and works in London. His work has been exhibited at the The National Museum, Stockholm, Ateneum Art Museum of the Finnish National Museum, MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Arts in Debrecen, Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Wilson is collected by the New York Public Library, the Deutsche Bank Collection, the Janet de Botton Collection, the United States Library of Congress and many others.

Selected Works

Selected Works Thumbnails
Hugo Wilson 

Figment, 2022

oil on canvas on panel 

210h x 189w x 5d cm.

82.68h x 74.41w x 1.97d in.

Hugo Wilson 

Figment, 2022

oil on canvas on panel 

210h x 189w x 5d cm.

82.68h x 74.41w x 1.97d in.

Hugo Wilson 

Figment, 2022

oil on canvas on panel 

210h x 189w x 5d cm.

82.68h x 74.41w x 1.97d in.