Nicolas Moufarrege
Recognize My Skin at the Queens Museum
A solo survey of Nicolas Moufarrege‘s work is being presented at the Queens Museum. Moufarrege was a pivotal artist who helped catalyze New York City’s East Village scene in the 1980s. You can immediately feel that sense of new rules allowed in many art forms that prevailed in the East village in the mid ’70s and ’80s. Moufarrege is a dedicated appropriator, taking images by established artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Hokusai, Munch and Picasso and placing them into embroidered paintings with historical and cultural references. It all works. Through his stitched painting combinations he tells stories and takes us on strange and sometimes mystical journeys. In this wonderful exhibit, more than 40 works are on display, featuring embroidered canvases and drawings, photographs and documents.
His placement of his appropriated images combined with the embroidered painting is truly what we find so exciting about his work. We are amazed by his brazen lifting of other artists’ famous work. Yet it is the balance of what we recognize to be art and his use of that art or found pieces added into a new textured, historically skewed piece with incredibly well-placed works that becomes an entirely new and bold piece of art.
In a review of the exhibition, the artist Etel Adnan remarked, “This is how traditional craftsmanship becomes a personal art full of promise.” We couldn’t agree more. Nicolas Moufarrege’s wit, imagination and his fearless appropriation is a wonder to be seen and well worth the trip to Queens to learn more about Moufarrege and the Queens Museum.
