Please join us for the opening reception of Penumbra, the gallery's first solo exhibition with Nicole Havekost.
Based in Rochester, Minnesota, Havekost’s practice centers on the female body, which she envisions as simultaneously exquisite and abject. Imbued with raw physicality, new works on paper, wall reliefs and sculptures construct the delicate, private experience of female corporeality with tender, laborious gestures.
Hidden scars, unkempt hairs and visceral protrusions are rendered in the delicate poked holes, deep red pastels and crystal flecks of Havekost’s oeuvre. Building a universe out of skin, the artist’s materiality nods to both Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. Through fields of silver and deep voids of powdery graphite bruised with soft pastels, a tactile vocabulary of corporeal abstraction emerges in ovaline shapes split with fissures and tears. Rendering physicality with striking vulnerability and tenderness, Havekost sculpts paper into dimensional objects and sprinkles rock salt on a vulvate form rendered in stitched felt hardened with beeswax. The intimacy of Havekost’s works can be uncomfortable, bringing viewers face to face with the taboo of living in a female body even as the curvature of its physique exudes beauty and birth.
Nicole Havekost lives and works in Rochester, Minnesota. She earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the University of New Mexico. She has exhibited extensively throughout the United States including recent solo and two-person exhibitions at the Rochester Art Center, Minnesota (2023), South Bend Museum of Art (2023), Catherine F. Murphy Gallery, St. Catherines’s University (2023) ,Minneapolis Institute of Art (2021) and Morris Graves Museum of Art in California (2019).
