Robert Nava: After Hours
Pace Gallery, New York
Through April 26, 2025
BLISS Daydream Dragon, 2024
© Robert Nava, courtesy Pace Gallery
Pace presents After Hours, an exhibition of new work by ROBERT NAVA, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. The show spans the gallery’s second and seventh floors, bringing together new paintings of various scales, including three monumental 8 x 13 foot canvases, and a selection of works on paper.
Populated by a cast of hybrid bodies, at once mythic and everyday, Nava’s paintings and drawings navigate the space between the raw and the refined. Often imbued with a sense of philosophical and psychological charge, his figures suggest a dark, contemplative, and existential mood despite their vibrancy, liveliness, and humor. Robert Nava takes inspiration for his distinctive lexicon of characters and forms from a diverse range of sources, from ancient art, mythology, and religion to horror films, science fiction, video games, and cartoons. Bold and lively, his works do not adhere to any kind of linear narrative—they are fantastical scenes of beauty and chaos that invite viewers to reconnect with the unbridled imagination of their childhoods.
“I don’t consciously revisit my fears, but after I paint, I feel a therapeutic sense of getting things out of me subconsciously,” Robert Nava has said of his intuitive process.
The artist’s exhibition with Pace in New York spotlights never-before-seen paintings and drawings he created in the past year. Robet Nava has intensified the action underway in many of these compositions, experimenting with scale, repeating images, and animated abstract elements. Two-headed tigers, birds, sharks, and other creatures proliferate across these maximalist works, which are exhibited alongside several subdued, minimal scenes he produced to balance the show. The artist situates several of his new figurations against dark skies replete with gold, glowing stars to evoke the magic of dreams, nightmares, and the unconscious mind.
A suite of elaborate new works on paper complements the paintings on view in After Hours. Highlighting the relationship between Nava’s drawing and painting practices, these works also shed light on his approach to sketching, an integral part of his work as an artist. In the pages of his notebooks, he works through ideas that come to life in his phantasmagoric paintings of real and imagined creatures. Exuding a sense of play, these small-scale drawings offer a more intimate, focused experience of the artist’s madcap world.
ROBERT NARVA (b. 1985, East Chicago, Indiana) earned a BFA in Fine Art from Indiana University in 2008 as well as an MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2011. His practice centers on large-scale paintings and works on paper that portray whimsical creatures, rendered through gestural markings. Finding inspiration in the art of the distant past, from Medieval Christian imagery to Mayan and Sumerian art, as well as popular contemporary sources such as animation, Robert Nava creates compositions that are carefully considered yet marked by a sense of naivete and spontaneity. His art has been exhibited in various solo exhibitions both domestically and abroad, including Robert Nava, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid (2024); Robert Nava: Mirror Quest, Hall Art Foundation, Germany (2023); Robert Nava, Fondazione Iris, Italy (2023); Robert Nava: STAND, The Watermill Center, New York (2022); Bloodsport, Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Robert Nava: Thunderbolt Disco, Pace Gallery, London (2022); Robert Nava, Pace Palm Beach (2021); Robert Nava: Angels, Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York (2021); and Robert Nava, Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels, Belgium (2020). Robert Nava’s work is held in public collections worldwide including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, California; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; and Perez Art Museum, Miami, Florida, among others.
PACE NEW YORK
540 West 25th Street, New York City
Robert Nava: After Hours @ Pace, New York, March 14 – April 26, 2025
