"I’ve been thinking about mis-registration. How an image comes together and how it can be unlayered. And how a drawing could be made in negative. What is innate, and what is applied? I am always looking for a support that does not already signify, or rest within itself. I keep coming back to the early films of Werner Schroeter, suchas Eika Katappa (1969) and The Death of Maria Malibran (1972), the way the soundtrack is violently laid on top of the image and breaks the relationship between sound, image, gesture and emotion, generating multiple possibilities at the same time. In a way it’s a celebration of an awkward kind of trying, of irreconcilability. I look at line, and its relationship to colour, how the colour holds on to the line, or is pressed down by it, or evades it ― a kind of desynchronized (yet full of desire) lip-synching between modes." (Nick Mauss)

The American/German artist Nick Mauss (1980) has formed his work through a finely tuned sensory register, with drawing at the centre of a praxis which otherwise eludes all simple categorizations. Expanding the medium of drawing through multiple registers at the same time, Mauss’ approach to drawing fuses peripatetically to other possible formats, including sculpture, publications, the format of the exhibition, and writing. In the last decade, Mauss has been expanding his artistic practice to encompass the role of curator, choreographer, scholar and performer. “I mean choreography,” says Mauss, “as a way to organise and rearrange, to work with media in time, to find new forms and sequences, as well as to revive historicalmaterial in the present.”

Nick Mauss lives and work in New York. His work “Images in Mind” is currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2020 he staged the exhibition “Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.” at Kunsthalle Basel and published “Transmissions” with Yale University Press and Dancing Foxes Press, a book that expands on his exhibition of the same name at the Whitney. In 2021 The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts invited Nick Mauss to present this project in conversation with Hilton Als, Emily Coates and Marci Kwon. His work will be on view at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in the exhibition Les Flammes. L'art vivant de la céramique curated by Anne Dressen, opening this October. Mauss recently had a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland (2020) and was part of the exhibition Transcorporealities at Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2019). He had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York (2018), Triennale di Milano and Torre Velasca, Milan (2018) and at the Serralves Museum, Porto (2017) with an accompanying catalogue. His work is part of the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Princeton Art Museum, Princeton; Long Museum, Shanghai; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; National Museum of Monaco, Princesse-Grace, Monaco and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims.