NAT MEADE: DRAWINGS

Book published by One Mile Gallery (2022). Format: Softcover with dustjacket, 9 x 9 inches, 32 pages.

Nat Meade: Drawings in an exhibition catalog that accompanied an eponymous show I curated at One Mile Gallery in Kingston, New York, in September 2022. The book includes all 24 drawings (reproduced at actual size) by the Brooklyn-based artist Nat Meade that were featured in the exhibition.

Like the artist’s acclaimed paintings — most recently seen in his spring 2022 one-person exhibition at Hesse Flatow Gallery in New York — the focus of these drawings is on fatherhood and other masculine tropes, which Meade subjects to a near-forensic analysis. As I described Meade’s work in my 2019 review in Artforum, “Meade’s works traffic in both the sacred and the profane in their attempt to embrace, dissect, and, on some level, destroy the father figures we all ultimately come to terms with, one way or another.” In the drawings, Meade submits these figures — nearly all sporting impossibly voluminous beards — to crashing waves, wind gusts, encroaching plant forms, and, in several works, decapitation. The medium of drawing has added a mesmerizing precision and deliberateness to Meade’s work, amplifying both the humor and the pathos in this remarkable artist’s trademark take on masculinity and gender.