RSR_26, 2026
Graphite, string, handmade paper
38 x 30 inches (96.52 x 76.2 cm) 

Courtesy of the Artist

Selected by Olivia Shao

N. Dash, born in 1980 in Miami, Florida (US), lives and works in New York (US)

At the center of N. Dash’s work is a commitment to the energy of transformation, movement, and care through an ecological vision that honors the land and its unseen energies.With a notable economy of means, N. Dash’s work expresses the tension between industrially produced goods and naturally occurring substances.

The work of N. Dash conveys a tactile sensitivity through the artist’s manipulation of materials such as paint, fabric, earth, styrofoam, agricultural netting, castoff cardboard and string. Utilizing a wide variety of media with minute attention to detail, Dash constructs works that engage with visible and invisible forms of energy and movement: of bodily meridians, architectural circulation, and environmental flux. The ground for many of N. Dash’s compositions is earth, which is applied in smooth, graded surfaces that crack and fissure during the drying process, creating topological fields. These earthen grounds frequently serve as a base for various layers of graphite, ink, or paint, conjuring the sequential formation of planetary strata. This sense of geologic time is imbricated with materials that evoke biological cycles: string is removed from the smoothed-earth grounds, and coats lengths of cloth in pigment to act as wrapped or hanging elements, creating compositions that subtly blend diverse plant, mineral and synthetic matter. 

A preoccupation with undoing and remaking is also apparent in N. Dash’s practice of creating small fabric sculptures. Working small pieces of machine-loomed fabric between fingers and thumb for long durations until the gridded threads collapse into suggestive, disorderly tangles, N. Dash literally unfastens a structured industrial product to create a new form that magnifies the power of touch, gesture, and ritual.

N. Dash earned a BA from New York University in 2003 and an MFA from Columbia University, New York, in 2010. N. Dash has had solo exhibitions at S.M.A.K. (Ghent), Santa Barbara Museum of Contemporary Art, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield), Fondazione Giuliani (Rome), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) and White Flag Projects (St. Louis).

Work has been included in group exhibitions at SFMOMA (San Francisco) Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, MAXXI (Rome), Pier 54 High Line (New York), Jewish Museum (New York), Palazzo Strozzi (Florence), The Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney) and Abron Arts Center (New York).

The work is in the public collections of Guggenheim Museum (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), MoMA (New York), SFMOMA (San Francisco), Sammlung Goetz (Munich), Dallas Museum of Art, FRAC des Pays de la Loire (Carquefou), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Margulies Collection (Miami), Blanton Museum of Art (Austin), S.M.A.K. (Ghent), The Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), Kupferstichkabinett (Berlin), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley) and Kadist (Paris).