Everybody eats, everybody shits, everybody fucks, everybody worries about how their financial status will affect how much they eat, shit, and fuck and whether they’ll have enoungh in the tank to do it all over again. Then we go to bed, rinse, and repeat—another day older, another dollar richer or poorer or wiser or dumber, etc, etc, and then tomorrow, and then the next day, and so on, but with geopolitics, climate change, religion, ideology, identity thrown-in on top. It’s a lot. Whatever Gets You Thru the Night, Hugo Wilson’s fourth solo exhibition with Nicodim and his first in New York, layers all these anxieties, all the protein and molecules that comprise them, every quark of contemporary existence on top of each other from a single, all-seeing anarchic perspective.

Wilson began the paintings and works on paper that comprise the exhibition by colliding images of the most primal building blocks of existence—the vegetation and meat that we eat, the sustenance that makes up our very beings—with art-historical references to various ideologies and ways of holding on till tomorrow, and the next day, and so on. After each layered collision, he scrapes and mutilates the conflicting pieces in an attempt to unify them into a single vantagepoint, then again, then again. He is Sisyphus on the Euthanasia Coaster with a death of ego at every circuit. The results are more zen than brutal: the black-and white of, Centric, his monumental triptych, becomes less of a binary push-and-pull between the tones than a blissful, all-encompassing cloud of emotion; the blood-red rib cages within the paintings Fetish I, Fetish II, and Fetish III meld with the leafy greens and blues around them, till the compositions themselves approach the Sublime, an invigorating reminder of our own mortality in the face of the cosmos.

At the end of the day, there is comfort to be found in Wilson’s chaos. The works are forceful reminders that whatever gets you through the night, it’s alright, it's alright.

Hugo Wilson (b. 1982, United Kingdom) lives and works in London. His work has been exhibited at the The National Museum, Stockholm, Busan Metropoli­tan Art Museum, the National Por­trait Gallery, and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Wilson is collected by the New York Pub­lic Library, the Deutsche Bank Col­lec­tion, the Janet de Bot­ton Col­lec­tion, the United States Library of Congress and many others. Recent exhibitions include Joshua Hagler, Devin B. Johnson, Nicola Samorì, Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2023); Carnal Agreement, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2022, solo); Hollow Moon, Nicodim, New York (2021); Hugo Wilson, Parafin, London (2020, solo); Coincidental Truths, Galerie Judin, Berlin (2020, solo); When You Waked Up the Buffalo, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2020); Iconic Works, The National Museum, Stockholm; Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Museum, Helsinki (2020); Crucible, Galerie Isa, Mumbai (2019, solo); Skin Stealers, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2019); Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2018, solo); Dialogues / New Paintings from London, GASK, Kutná Hora Museum, Czech Republic Frieze Sculpture Park, Regent’s Park, London (2018).