Peter Nadin: First Mark

Peter Nadin has shown no work since 1992. His last exhibition came after 16 years of critical and commercial success, with works going to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Yale University Art Gallery and many museums across Western Europe. Nadin stopped exhibiting in order to "unlearn how to make art." The past decade and a half has been marked by a very private artistic productivity on the farm he owns with his wife in the Catskill Mountains. Old Field Farm boasts 150 acres of forest, pasture for goats, chickens, hogs and wild bees and vegetable and fruit gardens. The paintings and sculptures included in First Marks involve a process intimately linked to the farm, its animals, vegetation and surrounding environs. Drawing on the farm's available sensory stimuli, Nadin makes marks on linen using such materials as honey, wax, bee propolis, black walnut, elderberry, chicken eggs and cashmere wool. The 76 paintings and sculptures in First Marks represent an artistic process nearly 15 years in the making, a process that boldly reduces art to its simplest premises. Peter Nadin teaches classes on the relationship between cognitive science and art at Cooper Union, New York.