Perrotin is pleased to present Moonwater, a solo exhibition by Nancy Graves, in New York.
October 28 – December 19, 2026
Nancy Graves (1939–1995) is best known for her paintings and sculptures, though her wide-ranging practice also encompassed drawing, printmaking, watercolor, and film. Her early work was informed by natural history, most famously in her 1969 Camel sculptures, recently exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Graves subsequently turned to systems of mapping and representation, drawing on satellite imagery, cartographic sources, and bathymetric studies of the ocean floor, for her paintings and works on paper.
Moonwater brings together a range of works that reveal the breadth of Graves’ watercolor practice. Rather than abandoning her earlier sources, Graves allowed them to fragment and accumulate, opening scientific observation onto a more intuitive and associative mode of image-making. Works such as Vood (1978) combine translucent washes, dry brushwork, and spontaneous drips, while Owlo (1978), Strabo (1979), and Hide and Seek (1982) layer meteorological data, botanical forms, prehistoric cup-and-ring carvings, and abstracted snakes over shifting fields of color.
The atmospheric effects of the watercolors also resonate with Graves’ contemporaneous use of airbrush. In Where-There (1980), diagrams of insects and suggestions of archaeological excavation maps are overlaid with sweeping brushstrokes, collapsing precise systems of information into a dynamic field of gesture. The watercolor process itself encouraged this tension between control and chance. Working on paper that was wet on both sides, Graves had only a limited window in which to build the image.
Moonwater reveals a pivotal moment in Graves’ practice, as her longstanding engagement with scientific observation evolved into an increasingly fluid and open-ended visual language, in which data, imagery, gesture, and abstraction coexist and resist a single point of entry or interpretation.
Nancy Graves’ watercolors have never been the subject of a survey until now. Her works on paper are in renowned public and private collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY); The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (Poughkeepsie, NY); The Buffalo AKG Art Museum (Buffalo, NY); Le Frac Auvergne (Clermont-Ferrand, France); as well as the Ludwig Forum for International Art (Aachen, Germany).