Child's Play: Nicola Tyson

Nicola Tyson paints amalgams of distorted body parts and colored shapes, creating mutilated zoological beings. Tyson’s paintings are engrossing, painted imagined beings with vivacious color float in undefined spaces of mono- or dichromatic backgrounds. As described in an exhibition catalogue for her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich, “anatomical normality becomes a rarity, childish timidity evokes hoary gnomes, poses of rarefied tranquility float off into bizarre stick figures.”[1] Yet her characters, as fantastical as they initially appear, possess traces of human attributes--physical or psychological--that are understood as self-portraits. The manipulative inspection of the human figure exposes an individual vulnerability, one grappling with questions of feminine identity and desire, struggling to expose the unconscious spirits of conscious uncertainty. [2] [3] As part of Tyson’s female identity, she pursues issues of sexuality stemming from distorted perceptions of the self from puberty; the body becomes the site of hostility and detachment. The figures appear completely unaware of their bodily appearance, however odd they may seem to viewers, which results in heightened awareness from the viewer’s perspective of active looking.[4] Tyson’s satirically dry sense of humor reaches her subject matter through her painting style--her technique of applying paint is congruous with her choice in subject matter.[5] “Often simple outlines, mere contour or bundles of line, suffice to render acts of psychophysical transformation, rigidity and opening.”[6] Tyson’s painting appears impulsive, with broad, uneven brushstrokes to animate figures and flat, color-blocked backgrounds; her paintings recall childhood art whose success would fall flat for less skilled artists. Despite Tyson’s simple, even unaffected style of painting, her works “elicit surprisingly complex emotional responses.”[7]

Each of the four featured paintings; Couple (2011), Self-Portrait with Friend (2011), Two Figures Touching (2011), and Two Figures in Orange (2011), transfigure the female figure to problematize the understanding of a fixed identity.[8] Tyson’s distortion of proportions combined with her palette of stimulating, dynamic colors of bright brights and fleshy nudes allows her to achieve a level of ambiguity [9] that focuses not on illusions of depth, but rather on the form of the figures, their individual presence and social interactions. In Two Figures Touching, for example, they are not doing so. The purple-faced creature with striped shirt reaches out towards the character in tribal-resembling pants with a particular curiosity. Couple exhibits two, highly abstracted individuals, facing each other. Their bodies are composed of ovals and curvilinear forms, floating in an undefined space or approaching the foreground of the painting. These paintings appear opposite of stylized; Tyson catches figures in momentary actions, unnaturally positioned and depicted. This ultimately adds to the compulsive nature of Tyson’s work, harking back to intuitive inventiveness and spontaneity. 

Nicola Tyson, Couple, 2011

Oil on canvas

Nicola Tyson, Self-Portrait with Friend, 2011

Oil on canvas

Nicola Tyson, Two Figures Touching, 2011

Oil on canvas

Nicola Tyson, Two Figures in Orange, 2011

Oil on canvas

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[1] Kunsthalle Zurich.

[2] Where Laughter Comes In

[3] ArtPapers

[4] Where Laughter Comes In

[5] Marc Foxx

[6] Kunsthalle Zurich.

[7] Art in America

[8] ArtPapers

[9] Artforum