Aakash Nihalani
New York, New York
Aakash Nihalani is fast becoming recognized as one of the US’s most striking emerging installation artists. Celebrated for his ephemeral modifications of the urban landscape, the young Brooklyn-based tape specialist wields an abstract narrative of isometric shapes and flamboyant hues grounded in quiet irony and idiosyncratic precision. The fluidity of his minimal, colorful style, which employs familiar shapes to produce unexpected visuals, initiates an inviting, living dialogue that traverses the chaos of city streets, the white walls of the gallery and the constancy of home.
Nihalani's street installations, which are constructed from strips of instantly identifiable fluorescent tape, open up unexpected dimensions and often enlightening and humorous perspectives to the otherwise routine urbanscapes upon which they are affixed. His pieces are meant to engage the public by creating environments that can be physically entered and explored from various angles, exposing unnoticed details, and transforming passersby or gallery visitors into active participants, offering them a momentary refuge from the isolation of daily city life. In his most recent gallery works, Aakash utilizes his interactive and obsessively geometric street methods to both acknowledge and subvert the traditional spatial confines of rectangular white canvases on a wall. His paintings, prints, and sculptures are intuitively dynamic structures that grow within and around canvases, like plant roots, orderly yet organic, breathing fresh new life into the concept of what a painting can be, and how it should be viewed.
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