NIKKI MALOOF – ASPECTS OF DAILY LIFE
2025-09-22Meditation on the finality of things and the beauty of nature, evocation of the fleeing of time and a tool of revelation of the world, the haiku offers in a few words a melancholic and concise image, both sweet and bitter, whose fall invites an unexpected humour. While poetic references regularly inhabit Nikki Maloof’s painting, such as to Robert Lowell’s poem Skunk Hour, where one of her previous paintings borrows the title, her recent works have something of this Japanese art of the ellipse. In her painting Flounder (2024), the fish are placed one on top of the other, immobilized in the derision of suspended time, eyes open in astonishment at being there and yet no longer being there, bringing to mind the verses of Matsuo Bashō, grand master of the haiku: In the spring that goes away/The birds scream/The eyes of the fish in tears.
Opposite – Flounder, 2024
Exhibition runs through to October 25th, 2025
Perrotin
1F, 6-6-9 Roppongi
Minato-Ku
106-0032 Tokyo
Japan
