McClain Gallery is pleased to present Angelina Nasso: Venus sequence, an exhibition of paintings on paper, each featuring vast flows of paint helmed by broad circles or half domes. Nasso unveils a vibrant meditation on the unseen forces that connect our inner and outer worlds. Rendered in tones of purple, green, and teal with phosphorescent pigments, these works explore the liminal – a space of spiritual openness and potential.

In 2016, Nasso underwent a near-death experience. In this body of work, the artist attempts to parse what she went through by investigating dreams, visions, and altered states of consciousness. Nasso’s sweeping brush work and glowing, orblike forms embody a sense of energy and flow, suggesting a communion with nature and unseen realms. Her work serves as an invitation to pause and consider beauty beyond the material, where art becomes a bridge to the transcendent. By giving validity to transformative realms of creativity, Nasso opens a powerful gateway to affirming forces beyond what we can see, own, dominate, and market. In this way, and as in the work of other women and transcendentalists, Nasso’s paintings resist common misconceptions of spirituality in art and confront the exploitation of beauty by patriarchal culture.

A writer as much as a painter, Nasso writes the below about Venus sequence:

Patient valley of the feminine heart
backward and forward,
atemporal and infinite,
configurations and energetic potentials,
reference the mystery of how things come to be.

States of openness
doing and allowing,
friction and surrender,
fluid and responsive.

Divine ideation condenses,
immaterial to material,
form unfolding into existence.

Can an object be made out of stars?

Angelina Nasso (b. 1973) explores the "space of potentiality" in which we live and move through on a daily basis in her paintings. After focusing on writing for a time, Nasso has returned to the studio with renewed purpose, continuing to expand on her exploration of the relationship between the individual and the universe. Throughout her two and a half decade career she has spoken about the interactive connection between the two, influenced by physicist John Wheeler's proposition that we live in a "participatory" universe. Nasso sees her work as an ongoing exploration of this planet, one that is a constant work in progress. When executed on a grand scale, these paintings seek the sublime: Nasso states that she is "in awe of the power of this beautiful world with its many extremes constantly pushing against itself and creating itself... it is a mystery".

Angelina Nasso was born in Sydney, Australia and is currently based in upstate New York. She has studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, the China National Academy of Art and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Nasso's work has been exhibited extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia and her work is represented in corporate collections worldwide including a major commission for Tiffany & Co. in Prague, Czech Republic.