James Nares: Moves is the first retrospective for the British-born, New York–based artist. Over the course of a career spanning five decades, Nares (b. 1953) has investigated, challenged, and expanded the boundaries of his multiple media, producing significant projects in painting, sculpture, drawing, film, photography, and music.

While the artist’s single-brushstroke paintings remain the most recognizable and celebrated of his works, the release of STREET, in 2011, brought to the fore a vital aspect of the artist’s production: film. Indeed, despite Nares’s renown as a painter, film has served as his most steadfast and productive interlocutor and protagonist.

This exhibition will highlight key works and projects from the artist’s career and shed light on the connections between them; specifically the exhibition will elucidate the manner in which film informs Nares’s explorations of gesture, time, and motion and the multiple facets of his career. Ultimately, James Nares: Moves posits the artist’s entire body of work as innately “filmic” or “photographic,” revealing a new way to understand the nature of his art making and the significance of his career to postwar art in New York and beyond.

Organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum