Nicola López

Nicola López’s work in drawing, printmaking, site-specific installation, sculpture and video examines and reconfigures our contemporary landscape, pointing to deep connections and rifts between our human-constructed world and the systems and cycles of nature. She engages architecture and urban structure as ever-accumulating evidence of human aspirations and failures, often contrasting and intertwining them with geological and organic formations. Her work draws on anthropology, architecture, urban planning and historical and fictional explorations of utopia/dystopia. It also leans heavily into material process, intentionally bringing joy, improvisation, and care into the work as it reflects on human patterns of extraction and construction.

López has participated in several residencies and received grants and fellowships including the 2024 John S. Guggenheim Fellowship, NYFA Fellowship in Drawing/Printmaking/Book Arts, a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and a Sovern/Columbia Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Her work is held in numerous prominent institutional collections and has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, the Denver Art Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, the Albuquerque Museum and the Inside-Out Museum in Beijing.