Nicolas V. Sanchez & Dina Brodsky: Present, Past

In "Present, Past", on view at Galerie Mokum February 10th–March 9th, contemporary artists Dina Brodsky and Nicolas V. Sanchez explore belonging and place: homes into which we might be transplanted or that we return to following an absence. Personal narratives underpin their subjects—trees, family members, farm structures, and pastoral scenes.  Brodsky and Sanchez's meditative treatment of their subjects reveals a reason for their hyper-focus. Theirs is an artistic practice as a means to understand their world—to probe their ancestral heritage and the places where they have roots. 

 In Dina Brodsky’s meticulously observed tree portraits, the deep roots of trees anchor and support the explorative action above: branches reaching and foliage unfurling into wider realms, the vast overstory where artist, creation, and world meet. The drawings are both portraits of specific trees, and a metaphor for her own search for meaning, and a place to plant her roots.  In Brodsky’s newest body of work for Galerie Mokum, the trees rendered in her distinctive style—honed through a deeply meditative sketchbook practice—stand on their own. Brodsky’s works on paper are jewel-like in their presentation of a subject that she has returned to again and again, elegizing a natural world and its statuesque, ancient organisms. Each portrait reveals the tree’s unique personality, wooded features providing endless inspiration for the artist’s hand and the viewer’s eye. However, since returning to her childhood hometown to raise her family, Brodsky has noticed in her close study of trees a deeper significance.  W Like the network connecting trees in a forest, between each of Brodsky’s works threads an unseen narrative. The artist’s return to a past home is a reconnecting with her roots—the family, place, and community—that first supported her growth.

Nicolas V. Sanchez is an artist with a distinctive vision and an unparalleled ability to communicate it through a particular artistic medium. In his newest body of work for Galerie Mokum and his first exhibition of 2024, meticulous detail rendered in ballpoint pen—a technical skill that many artists would gladly rest laurels upon—is utilized in service of a unique point of view. For multi-generational Americans, the midwestern, rural landscapes populated with familial subjects, animals, and structures in this series may construct a familiar scene. For Sanchez, a first-generation Mexican-American artist, they form a radical one: an America that retains a kind of nostalgia even while new peoples and cultures affect change by taking root. Like an Old Master style drawing depicting a modern subject, Sanchez’s dedication to realism and mastery of technique is trained on the immigrant family’s very contemporary experience. The artist’s warm tones and devotional attention to detail may suggest that new cultures feel at home and embraced when transplanted into the American landscape. Yet, Sanchez’s hyper-focused eye may also reveal a tension—an unsettled joining of two identities. The close study of his subjects is a means to understand, depict, and even reconcile this deeper implication.