Naudline Pierre

Naudline Pierre
MFASO Lecture Series
Wednesday, September 25 at 7:00 PM
Flex Space at 205 Hudson

Naudline Pierre’s paintings draw from fantasy and iconography to conjure alternate worlds. Swirling with jewel-toned texture, her works center ecstasy, devotion, and tenderness in epic scenes that generate space for rescue and healing. Pierre’s winged figures are enveloped in vast, horizonless landscapes, where they come together in acts of intimacy and salvation: they reach longingly outward toward each other, congregate, and embrace, emoting protection and care.

Rendered in layers of prismatic-colored washes, the artist’s subjects are limitless and uniquely out of step with time. Cast within stories of sublimation, mercy, and resurrection, their ethereal bodies defy boundaries set by inherited mythology and art-historical precedent. Within these narratives, Pierre inscribes her alter-ego as protagonist—a vessel to explore the infinite future possibilities that can be accessed through imagination and self-possession.

Pierre’s work situates personal mythology and transcendent intimacy alongside canonical narratives of devotion. Her works continue the art-historical tradition of portraying encounters between the earthly and the otherworldly, extending this lineage of image-making by injecting the conventions of her discipline with ephemerality and ambiguity. Referencing the Renaissance format of the altar triptych, for example, or incorporating flattened space and forced perspective, she reconfigures formal systems from the past to generate new possible futures grounded in the here and now.

Naudline Pierre (b. 1989, Leominster, MA) received an M.F.A. from New York Academy of Art, NY, and a B.F.A. from Andrews University, MI. Pierre has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at The Drawing Center (2023) and the Dallas Museum of Art (2021). Pierre participated in the 2019–2020 Studio Museum’s Artist Residency and, as a culmination of the program, exhibited in a three-person exhibition at MoMA PS1. Pierre has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, most recently at Fondation Carmignac, Hyères, France; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Palazzo Barberini, Rome, Italy; the Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Prospect.5 New Orleans, LA; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; The Dean Collection, Macedon, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; ICA Miami, Miami, FL; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; and the CC Foundation, Shanghai, China. Pierre lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Photo: Molly Matalon