James Nares

Associated with New York's downtown "no-wave" scene in the 1970s and 1980s, James Nares creates paintings, films, and videos that reflect the artist's improvisational sensibility and interest in capturing time and motion. In the 1970s, Nares was best known for films that have been described as "kinetic investigations," such as Pendulum (1976), for which he swung a large sphere attached to a wire from a footbridge in Lower Manhattan, filming its movements against the gritty urban backdrop. He later turned to painting, translating the ethos of his films and videos into a new medium. Using a unique paintbrush of his own design, Nares typically creates his paintings with a single, continuous brushstroke, resulting in canvases that are both depictions of fluid, abstract forms and records of the artist's own gestures. Nares's work has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 2008, Anthology Film Archives hosted a retrospective of his work in film and video.