Nicolas Tovar at the Twenty-Two New York

Nicolas Tovar (b. 2001, New York, USA) is a mixed media artist currently based in New York City. He received his formal training at the Slade School of Fine Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Having lived in Chicago, London, and New York, his works epitomize an urban sensibility. Creating works on raw canvas, earthy tones emerge from months of unprecious use, the accumulation of accidental marks and residue from other components in the studio, as well as exhausted images and watercolors that occasionally coalesce to form a singular image among others. Tovar describes these works as sites of physical labor. Taking a non-fetishized approach to the material, the artist prioritizes charging the surface of the work with memory, labor, and moments of chance—marks made beyond his control.

This approach allows him to create work that, much like our fragmented cultural landscape, embodies a collapse of context, where certain floating signifiers appear clearer than others. These sites of accumulation and erasure are understood by the artist more as constructions than paintings. While abroad, he worked under the guidance of Turner Prize nominee Oscar Murillo and exhibited work in galleries across Europe. Through these projects, Tovar continues to blur boundaries between construction and image, layering context and meaning within each surface.