ARNY NADLER

Adaptations

April 4-June 21, 2025

Bruno David is pleased to present Adaptations, an exhibition by artist Arny Nadler. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

In this new series, Nadler’s work explores ideas of wholeness in physical and psychological forms. In clay and ink, he contemplates the body’s precarity and its ability to adapt. Nadler says: “These simultaneously heroic and absurd forms question our fixed notions of defeat and triumph. In the face of danger, desire, or even loss, theirs is a system that adjusts toward survival.”

Many works begin as individual parts that are eventually grafted together in a manner that nods at structural order but disregards anatomical and proportional correctness. Irregular outgrowths in the material signal erratic germination or atrophy—a misfiguration of appendages. The resulting forms acknowledge the limitations of the body and flout conventional response systems. Where traditional figurative sculpture often captures a predictable motion in time and space, Nadler’s work changes as the viewer moves around it. What happens on one side might be wholly unanticipated on the other. By working against symmetry, he confronts the expectations of wholeness for the body.

Nadler has works in the permanent collection of the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and was included in the 24th No Dead Artists exhibition at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans. Recent solo exhibitions include the Haggerty Gallery of the University of Dallas, Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois and Jacksonville University in Jacksonville, Florida. In 2021 he was included in This Moment of Rupture, a national survey of contemporary ceramics at VisArts Art Center in Rockville, MD. Other venues include the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Newport Beach Civic Center and the Catherine Konner Sculpture Park, with reviews in Art in America and other publications. Nadler is a recipient of grants and fellowships from the George Sugarman Foundation, the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. He is an Associate Professor of Art at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis.