Nabilah Nordin: Primary Matter

“I don’t believe in material hierarchies.”

- Nabilah Nordin, Vogue Australia, March 2023

parrasch heijnen is pleased to present Nabilah Nordin: Primary Matter, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Los Angeles, CA-based artist Nabilah Nordin (b. 1991, Singapore).

Nordin’s sculptures dance with gravity and an internal buoyancy that evokes the process of their creation. The artist’s organic yet constructed forms unfurl, topple, grow, and balance, as each work’s uniformity in color is juxtaposed in a vibrant assemblage of shapes, meditating within a lyrical solidity. Nordin’s works are adorned with a texture implicative of an internal life, combining elements of raw earth with new world materials, blurring the lines between the natural and the manufactured with “skins” that adapt to their given environment. Her process is an investigation of surface and material: “the pretense of how things appear: what may look like a stone object, or a rusted chunk of metal is actually the ‘skin’ pretending and performing as something else,” she explains.

“I want my sculptures to seduce people with the tactility of their physical qualities - a sharp prick of pyrite; the crunch of stone under foot. I want to trigger a desire for material sensation and to make people hyper-aware of their bodies. I try to do this by animating commonly found raw or artificial materials, from rubber mulch to stone and marble, and transform them into new life-forms. This is the spirit of Primary Matter.”

Singaporean-Australian artist Nabilah Nordin (b. 1991, Singapore) recently relocated to Los Angeles from Melbourne, Australia. Nordin completed a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts (Melbourne) in 2015, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts at RMIT University (Melbourne) in 2013. Nordin’s work has been widely exhibited at museums, biennales and galleries across Australia and Asia.

In 2023 Nordin was commissioned to make a major bronze outdoor sculpture (The Tie and the Undercoat, 2023) for the Australian Embassy in Washington, DC. Solo presentations include Corinthian Clump, The National 4, Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), 2023; Prop Shop, Neon Parc (Melbourne, Australia), 2022; Birdbrush and Other Essentials, Heide MOMA (Melbourne, Australia), 2021; and An Obstacle in Every Direction, Singapore Biennale (Singapore), 2019. Group shows include Keith Sonnier: Live in Your Head, parrasch heijnen (Los Angeles, CA), 2023; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia), 2023; Fantastic Forms, Bundanon Art Museum (Illaroo, Australia), 2023; A thousand different angles, McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery (Melbourne, Australia), 2022; SIMMER, Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) (Albury, Australia), 2021; and Salient Features, Changwon Sculpture Biennale (South Korea), 2020.