cfile.library | Learn How Nicole Cherubini Balances Opulence and Minimalism

Nicole Cherubini: The Love Tapes, a Retrospective
Hudson, NY: Retrospective Gallery, 2016
87 pages

Nicole Cherubini’s exhibition catalog for The Love Tapes, a Retrospective, is now available in cfile.library. To view the sample catalog click here or to get full access to the cfile.library begin your free membership trial today.

Nicole Cherubini is constantly balancing her interest in opulence and lavish materials with a kind of minimalism defined by sculptural rules that she sets for herself: pots cannot have bottoms. Pots cannot be glazed on the inside. Any bit of clay taken off of a pot must be re-adhered to the sculpture in some way. Cherubini makes rules to break rules.

In a conversation with Francesca DiMattio at the beginning of this catalog Cherubini remarks,

“There are so many rules that you are taught to believe! The wrongness is what I desired, and still desire. I think the more rules that are given to me, the more I want to break them. Yet I envy those people who function within the structure, not always trying to change it.”

–Nicole Cherubini

View a sample of this catalog!

Cherubini was extremely influenced by the Mevlâna mausoleum in Konya, the mausoleum of the Persian mystic Rumi, which she visited in 2000. Rooms with an abundance of gold and iridescence, bright royal greens and blues, mosaic textiles, velvet ropes. Then, around the corner there was a completely empty room with gorgeous wooden floors. She realized that the stark freshness of the empty space would have gone unnoticed if it weren’t for the excess of shapes and depth of texture and color in the rooms before. The influence is obvious in her work.

“At that moment, it all made sense; I was able to see one because of the other.”

In this catalog from her show at Retrospective Gallery at the beginning of 2016, Cherubini shows us lavishly glazed pots that sparkle beside clay not glazed. She intentionally separates these surfaces to show that clay and glaze are not one, but two separate materials that will only be understood if we experience them separately as well as together. Clay as an “expansive and technically nuanced “material with layers of history; glaze as producing colors that painters couldn’t dream of. Both are poignant in their own.

“Clay serves as a record of time in many ways, and I am struck by the incongruous connection between slow decision and fast marks in your work [to Cherubini]. The clay is slammed if you want it slammed, quickly squeezed if you want it squeezed…”. –Francesca DiMattio

The stark wooden floors she describes in the mausoleum are recollected as wooden pedestals under ceramic objects.

This catalog includes a nine-page conversation between Francesca DiMattio and Nicole Cherubini, an essay by Jenny Monick, and images of Cherubini’s work in The Love Tapes, a Retrospective at Retrospective Gallery in Hudson, NY.