NINA CHANEL ABNEY: NOW WHAT? OR WHAT ELSE?

Perrotin Paris is proud to present Now What? Or What Else?, the debut solo exhibition in Paris by acclaimed American artist Nina Chanel Abney.

September 6 – October 11, 2025

Abney’s practice has long blurred the lines between humor and horror, figuration and abstraction, public spectacle and private psychology. In this new series, her bold, graphic compositions depict a surreal kind of everyday life: couples in bed beside mounds of laundry, picnics unfolding in poisoned air, grocery carts filled with existential dread. Forests burn in the background. Oil rigs sit just beyond the beach. Sunbathers float beside dead fish. The world continues, but something is deeply off. And no one flinches.

Rather than capturing catastrophe at its peak, Now What? Or What Else? turns inward. It centers the dullness, detachment, and quiet repetition that now define our shared emotional climate. The urgency has shifted. People know too much and feel too little. These paintings do not scream. They linger. They witness. They endure.

'When you work with images, that's people's starting point. It's really hard to look at faces nowadays, especially when they're cropped, and not think about image overload or social media. This interpretation is often applied to my work, and I don't think it's wrong. But it's simply not my starting point; in fact, it's the part of my work that puzzles me the most ,' explains the painter, who is more likely to cite the "icy quality" of Piero della Francesca's paintings as a source of inspiration than the great American pop tradition.