Nancy Dwyer at Kunsthalle Winterthur

Nancy Dwyer knows TV. Especially TV commercials. Promises, directives, aphorisms, platitudes. The language of advertising is Dwyer’s turf. But not only — her works derive from song lyrics, slang, courtroom jargon (or the televised version thereof), the names of network channels, colloquialisms, idioms. Words are the basis of everything Nancy Dwyer does — words rooted in what has become the mass media vernacular of how we understand American culture.

In painting, sculpture, works on paper, and animation, Dwyer makes words as images, coaxes meaning — or what poses as meaningful — out of them. In Hot Mess (2024), also the title of the show, the two words replace the 20th Century Fox logo, painted on a curved wooden board installed on a television mount. In the sculpture Big Ego (1990/2024), the letters E, G, and O are blown-up larger than life. The painting Kick It (1991) spins the popular Tribe Called Quest song out of control — Can I Kick It? Yes You Can. Can I Think It? Yes You Can. Can I Smell It? Yes You Can. Etc., etc., etc. “BE YOURSELF”.

Nancy: “When I first heard this pep-talk adage, the first thing I thought was: You mean there’s a choice? I was so confused. I have since realized that 1. Choice is a concept born of privilege 2. It is an illusion.”

Dwyer’s work is often associated with a group of artists named The Pictures Generation, a term coined by Douglas Crimp after the show Pictures he curated at Artists Space, New York, in 1977. Crimp outlined the common interests of this group as drawing from newspapers, advertisements, films, and television to analyze these media as signifiers of reality. Subjectivity was defined and creative expression found through (and exclusively through) the lens of consumer mechanisms. No “I” without its image.

But whilst others were rejecting popular culture and courting ironic detachment in their work, Dwyer celebrated it. Her stance is ambivalent: she loves pop and she loves to deconstruct it, taking an approach that is direct and witty rather than detached and ironic. In contrast to many of her peers, Dwyer’s works often have no single source. They are rather mash-ups of familiar references that are firmly inscribed into our visual and textual imaginaries.

Hot Mess is the artist’s first institutional solo show in Europe and the first exhibit of this scale after a hiatus of nearly a decade. The exhibition brings together works from the ‘80s to today and includes a new series of works as well as two public art works, a domain the artist worked in time and again. Included, among other works, are Dwyer’s earliest word sculpture LIE (1986) — the three letters of the word clad in a marble-imitation formica — and Twin Towers (1985), painted in reverse onto plexiglass and showing two popes as the emblem and brand of a logic beyond the original to one of the double.

In her technique, Dwyer is meticulous. Her method is labor-intensive, non-mechanical, and hand-made; it flies in the face of what one might assume when working with popular media. Alongside her art education, Dwyer trained as a commercial sign maker. This becomes apparent in how she reverses representation, a technique she describes as ‘inside out’. She does not shift image into language, a conceptual move that is firmly anchored in the art historical canon of the dematerialization of the art work and that opposed the (commodifiable) object. Instead, Dwyer materializes language as image.

Nancy Dwyer (*1954, New York, lives in Santa Fe) was a co-founder of Hallwalls, a non-profit organization created as a cooperative for artists in Buffalo, NY in 1974. Dwyer has exhibited in major museums, among them notably: a solo retrospective at the Fisher Landau Center for Art in New York in 2013; ‘The Pictures Generation’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2009; and ‘Bad Girls’ at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1994.