Young Brooklyn-based artist Nick van Woert is everywhere at Frieze New York this year. The full booth of Amsterdam’s Grimm Gallery is given over to his gym-inspired installation; an additional sculpture resembling rough-hewn concrete beams is spotlighted by L.A.’s L&M Arts; and his massive outdoor piece, Primitive— a headless, humanoid figure seemingly hanging from a gallows — is part of the Frieze Sculpture Park. Modern Painters executive editor Scott Indrisek caught up with van Woert at the fair to talk about his recent work and his plans for an upcoming show at Yvon Lambert.
So your installation in the Grimm Gallery booth is sort of like a gym setup.
It’s a straight-up gym.
And that show you had at Room East on the Lower East Side last year was based on street-fighting, and street-fighting manuals. So there’s a lot of athleticism in the work.
There is. But I think athleticism and lifting weights paints a picture of the human body, in a way, and the gym [equipment] is a figurative sculpture. The arms, legs, and chest are all articulated within the machine. So for me it serves as a weird drawing or floor plan of the human body, which I think is seen in the same light as classical sculpture, a monolithic understanding of the human body carved in stone. The other objects [in Grimm’s booth] are these kind of silicone hula hoops. With the gym [machine] being a figurative sculpture with a weird geometry, I wanted to make other sculptures off of it, so those hoops are sized to fit around the machine. As you know, I’ve been into classical sculpture and how those materials have changed, and I think this is one of the logical stepping stones to evolve into.
Do you go to the gym?
No. But there’s an interesting thing about gymnasium – the root of the word is “to be naked.” Primitive, [my piece in the Sculpture Park] is about this primitive lifestyle where things are stripped away. That goes into some Thoreau stuff, where I want to live simply off the land and sea, and if it’s brutal let it be brutal, and all of that.
What’s the heavy-looking material attached to the gym machine?
The weights are cat litter. I use plastic resin to get it to stick together. It’s Fresh Step.
I just had a show in L.A. [“No Man’s Land” at OHWOW Gallery], and the [basis] for the show, was all things that are substitutes for natural materials. So cat litter, to me, equals dirt.
And the other piece at Yvon Lambert?
Cat litter. And that rack [structure] is kind of based on a Home Depot lumber rack. So the show that’s coming up at Yvon Lambert is going to be set up kind of like a Home Depot.
The cat litter also looks a bit like aquarium gravel.
Well, that was another material in the L.A. show; it’s a substitute for coral and all of that. That got me into this territory of altered states: I’m walking around in this drunk landscape, where nothing is what it seems.
What’s the drunk landscape? The whole world?
Yeah, just go down any street. Architecture nowadays, it’s crazy. Faux-finished to look like wood, to look like marble. It’s a weird fantasy where you’re in this Western ghost town with fake facades. That kind of approach to architecture — we’re going to make the ‘Home Depot’ based on that.