Nikholis Planck: Tempo House

About

Opening reception: Sunday, September 16 from 6-8pm 
Tempo House presents both new paintings and the latest iteration of Nikholis Planck’s concept of a “nightclub with no overhead”. For the duration of the exhibition, the paintings in the street-level gallery remain in place, while a changing cast and series of performances and events in the (_hr) club vibrate in the lower gallery below them. 

Tempo—the speed at which a piece of music is meant to be played—is denoted by specific markings indicating the actual duration of the time values. In painting, Planck sets a pace of urgency and fluidity of time. Tempo House is not only meant to impose a sense of order, rhyme or reason but also to shed light on the potential for disorder and misinterpretation. For him, there is no right or wrong way to execute the actions and movements; painting is akin to a piece of jazz music which can be played and construed in various ways. 

Within art history’s manifold expansions, painting is an open dialogue, an ever-festering wound to sooth. However suspicious of painting’s place at the top of artistic hierarchies—Planck remains invested in the medium while questioning its boundaries. His self-referential approach calls upon past projects and recycles previous works to produce and continue new arrangements. 

In canvases scrawled with “the attempts of painting” Planck presents his own post-mortem of Painting’s cadaver. For him, any work empties into another. The catalyst is the painting’s support and surface, into which he collages sculptures, discarded canvases, posters, and reclaimed wax. The built-up layers, like troubled-skin, are then embedded with information from other paintings upon which he conjures recurring muses and motifs. Stretching across painting, sculpture, performance and editions, his work is firmly rooted in the observational drawing tradition while balancing a state of constant flux. 

Performance times and events at (_hr) club to be announced. 

Nikholis Planck was born in 1987 in Arlington, VA. He lives and works in New York. Many of Planck's projects have paired mixed media paintings with low platforms or stage constructions and included performance schedules. Performers have included Keith LaFuente, Mario Maron, Paul Buonaguro, Karmeknife X, Elspeth Walker, Carolyn Schoerner, Winslow Laroche, Dan Herschlein, Chloe Maratta, Flannery Silva, and Max Guy. Planck has worked with numerous independent publishers to produce printed material, and regularly self-publishes his work in book, print and zine form. Planck's books and publications organize his drawing and collage as well as writing, "bootlegs" and documentation of his projects. He has recently held solo, two-person, and group exhibitions at 14a, Hamburg, Germany (2018); May 68, New York, NY (2018); Signal, Brooklyn, NY (2017); Rachel Uffner, New York (2016); Neochrome Gallery, Turin, IT (2016); Simone Subal, New York, NY (2015); KARMA, New York (2014); sophiajacob, Baltimore, MD (2013); and the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD (2012).