Nic Nicosia: Everyday Surreal, a survey of the last 25 years of one of the city’s most celebrated living artists, is now open at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas through Aug. 16. The stunning exhibition offers a fresh focus the Dallas native’s turn to sculpture in the 2010s, in an installation that evokes the subtly surreal environments of his photographs.
Nic Nicosia: Everyday Surreal
The exhibition highlights the shift in the artist’s work over the past two decades, marked by a move away from elaborate sets, casts, and crews to a solitary studio practice, focused on the production of a broad range of sculptures, drawings, and photographs. While maintaining a buoyant whimsy, Nicosia’s work became more inquisitive and philosophical, exploring themes of time, memory, and the psychological edges of everyday reality. Featuring over 70 works in varied media, the exhibition is the largest showing of Nicosia’s practice since his 1999/2000 museum survey.
Born in Dallas in 1951, Nic Nicosia came to prominence in the 1980s as part of the Pictures Generation. The unofficial group of artists practicing in the 1970s and ’80s questioned the authenticity of images. He is best known for his photographs and films depicting everyday life-moments–quietly quirky or completely gone awry—with costumed actors in brightly-colored sets including real objects with artist-made simulacra and hand-drawn or painted images.
Nicosia’s Early Photography Used Elaborate Sets
Nicosia’s early photography relied on the production of elaborate hand-made objects and constructed sets, as well as numerous assistants and actors. In 2001, Nicosia, working largely on his own, turned to making the settings for his pictures on a smaller scale, constructing models of rooms, collaging them with images taken elsewhere, and populating them with small, sculpted installations. In 2009, he began making sculptures consistently, experimenting with paper clay and to produce eccentric personages and anonymous male figures taking on various poses and personas, such as those appearing in the photographic series, in the absence of others.
Many of these works initially populated the models for his staged photographs and, more recently, interiors, resulting in hand-collaged and rephotographed images that confound reality and artifice. Sculpture making soon began to take on a life of its own, aside from any role in photography, evolving into imagined creatures and fantastical insects. By 2018, Nicosia had expanded this exploration to include cast metal sculptures, such as bighands (2010), enlarged in 2020 as an eight-foot-tall steel sculpture for the Nasher’s permanent collection.
Nicosia’s Drawings Explore Time and Limitations
The artist’s drawings similarly explore the personal experience of time and its limitations. A drawing from 2015 traces the roughly 650-mile route from Santa Fe to Dallas 77 times to create a simple meditation on distance, duration, repetition, and movement, while other drawings mark the seconds in a day, or the first 65 years of a life. Still others record the random flow of thoughts and ideas that pass through one’s mind over time, appearing as doodles or blocks of words, sometimes recorded over spans of several months.
The Nasher Chief Curator Jed Morse
“It is incredible to consider that Nicosia has produced roughly four times the quantity of work after his mid-career survey in 1999/2000 as he did before it, taking on a greater variety of media,” says Chief Curator Jed Morse. “Everyday Surreal underscores a tremendously prolific and experimental period that speaks deeply and warmly to the strangeness and ironies that populate our daily lives.”
The major exhibition of a Dallas native holds special significance in the summer of 2026, as the region will host nine games for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The region also serves as the location for the games’ broadcast center, welcoming guests from around the world.
Nasher Sculpture Center Director Carlos Basualdo
“The Nasher Sculpture Center is delighted to present this exhibition by one of the most cherished artists in Dallas,” says Director Carlos Basualdo. “Nicosia’s joyful artistic practice prompts us to reflect on the contradictory nature of reality, pointing to universal themes while pursuing highly personal subjects. This close look at his captivating work promises to stir curiosity and introspection in equal measure.”
Nic Nicosia Nasher Exhibition in Dallas
Nic Nicosia: Everyday Surreal is organized by Nasher Sculpture Center Chief Curator Jed Morse who will also serve as the editor of a lavishly illustrated catalogue, featuring new scholarly essays, that will be published to accompany the exhibition.
The exhibition is made possible by leading support from the Texas Commission on the Arts. Generous support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. Support is provided by the Dallas Art Fair Foundation and Dallas Tourism Public Improvement District (DTPID).
The Nasher Sculpture Center is supported, in part, by Nasher Members, the Christine P. Gancarz Fund at The Dallas Foundation, The City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture, Bonnie E. Cobb, and the Texas Commission on the Arts.
