Nathan Hylden

Nathan Hylden is an American abstract painter admired for his ability to question the very essence of painting in a unique body of work. He chooses to utilize diverse media, such as aluminum, pearlescent paint and spray paints and each of his paintings becomes a meaningful frame within the larger sequence. Hylden’s main goal is to depict the complex relationships between absence and presence, emptiness and meaning, cause and effect. The aesthetics behind Hylden’s work is clearly contemporary and unpredictable in its uniqueness.

Coherent Groups of Paintings

Hylden has earned his MFA from Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, in 2006, and his BFA from Minnesota State University, in 2001. He was also a guest student at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt, in 2005. He developed his personal style of working in series, creating a number of coherent, interconnected works. Another typical quality of Hylden’s works are the artist’s broad gestures with paint, which end up overlapping each other and affecting multiple canvases. In this way, the artist creates coherent groups of work, which are intrinsically linked due to their shared materials and common aesthetics.

Hylden developed his personal style of working in series, creating a number of coherent works

Concepts of Absence and Presence

Hylden’s paintings are based on rigorous conceptual processes – the artist investigates the philosophical concepts and relationships between cause and effect, emptiness and meaning. He has developed quite elaborate technical processes – for example, he paints his canvases with holographic gold, arranges them on the floor and sprays the overlapping sections of the canvases yellow, before finally stenciling black stripes. This interesting process results in a series of interconnected works, since they are conceived in the same way, at the same time. In another series of paintings, Hylden uses a different yet equally unique approach – he screen-prints aluminum plates with an image of a blank canvas. There’s no better symbol of emptiness than an empty canvas and through this process the artist wants to reveal his idea that the materials used in painting, even empty canvases, are meaningful and carry a certain aesthetical value.

Hylden investigates the relationships between cause and effect, emptiness and meaning

International Success

Hylden became well-known and appreciated for his trademark process of taking the pre-condition of the canvas as the conceptual starting point for his puzzling pieces. His uniquely abstract, process-oriented artworks that investigate the puzzling dualities of existence such as blankness and figuration, singularity and plurality, the manual and the mechanical, have won a lot of attention in both American and international art scenes. He has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Koenig Galerie in Berlin, Richard Telles Fine Art in Los Angeles, Misako & Rosen in Tokyo and Art Concept in Paris.

Nathan Hylden lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Featured image: Nathan Hylden – Untitled (detail), 2015
All images via artsy.net