Off Paradise

About the Presentation
Off Paradise will exhibit historic works by the painter, sculptor, and poet Peter Nadin (b. 1954). A key figure of the downtown New York art scene of the late 1970s and 1980s, Nadin explores the practices of mark-making and image-making as fundamental, evolutionary human functions. The presentation will celebrate View II or The Artist (1986), a striking self-portrait which is entering the collection of a major European institution. This will be accompanied by a selection of watercolor and pastel works on paper from the Views II series (1987), presented for the first time since their creation. Nadin left the commercial art world in 1993 while continuing to paint on a farm in the Catskill Mountains, working with the land and showing only occasionally for close to 20 years. Off Paradise will host a pair of sequential exhibitions dedicated to Nadin at the gallery in New York in early 2024.

About the Gallery
Off Paradise is a gallery located on Walker Street founded by Natacha Polaert in the fall of 2019. The name evokes the old neighborhood of Five Points, at the center of which was a small, triangular park, full of hopes and grime, called Paradise Square. It also invokes Paradise Alley, the artists’ and poets’ colony on the then-godforsaken corner of Avenue A and East 11th Street that is referenced in Jack Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans. Off Paradise is a fictional place, right off Paradise, adjacent to it, but not exactly it.