Ramiken Crucible is pleased to announce an exhibition by New York based artist Nolan Hendrickson. This is his third solo exhibition with the gallery.

In 2009, Nolan Hendrickson illustrated and published Faggot Carnival, a book of cartoons. These cartoons featured clownish, lumpy melancholics, detached but moving calmly and shamelessly through the motions of crudely original forms of sexual experimentation.

Hendrickson’s paintings have articulated facets of this half-nude melancholic world through portraits immersed in an evolving mise en scène: game show catwalks and trapdoor orgys; play-doh villas filled with lush plants, watered by jolly green lotharios with splashing garden hoses; and in his last solo exhibition, New New Face, plastic surgery pioneers held court in outdoor gymnasiums festooned with ribbons continuosly fluttering from one painting to the next. Against these fantastical landscapes float the humor of an unabashed surrender by the sexual prole, told through the half smiles of pleasant sadness, frozen on jigsaw faces.

His second book, White Shoulders, published in 2013, developed the dynamics of awkward groups attempting to cum together. Printed under the superimposed grid of blotter paper, the illustrations in White Shoulders also suggested a mismanagement of the psychedelic, with an understudy in genital disillusionment.

This show of Hendrickson’s new work is composed of installations in both of the gallery’s spaces, which have been rechristened Ramiken Top and Ramiken Bottom.

At Ramiken Top, seven new drawings by Hendrickson, made with sumi ink on paper, present an array of subtle creeps, oral fascinations, puzzling new facial constructions, and quiet sadness, rendered with hypersensitive distance. In Ramiken Bottom, four new paintings eschew the chaos of his earlier compositions in favor of a close-up, laconic style of portraiture. The personal moods of his earlier paintings are intensified into a singular figurative contemplation, wreathed in sportswear.

Hendrickson’s precise expression of emotional in-between-ness is unique in how current his maps of the human being are. Hendrickson’s work is the most updated satellite imagery of the soul. These are the newest new new faces.