About PM/AM
PM/AM is a contemporary art gallery located on the border of Soho and Fitzorovia in the heart of London. It hosts a busy programme of shows across the two exhibition floors of the Eastcastle Street space. The gallery’s lower ground floor studio provides the location for a residency space for international and under-represented artists to develop their practice. Together the spaces form a unique cultural and creative hub in the bustling centre of the city.
PM/AM’s mission is to reflect through art how we engage with ourselves and the world today, expressed through the artists it is fortunate enough to work with. Recent graduates, those emerging into the spotlight and in their mid-careers on the international stage all feature across a dynamic programme. The gallery works on the vanguard of the emerging art sector, responsible for finding artists of tomorrow, and is keen to explore and present work originating from the many interlocking diasporas of the world. PM/AM’s plays a part in the incubation of contemporary art’s future by representing a carefully selected roster of artists, working with them to initiate and grow lasting careers in the global art world.
As a dynamic arts organisation PM/AM’s activities extend beyond exhibitions into consultation, publications and editorial, providing the means to facilitate placements with collectors and institutions, and create extended content to further support and expose the artists we work with. This self-contained structure is key to the gallery’s broad outlook and capabilities, however we value collaborations with external writers, curators and other galleries to realise our goals.
Exhibition Text
When you take something apart, you witness not only the separation of a whole into its components, you expose and manipulate the forces holding these parts together. Relationships between geometry and gravity change; purpose and meaning become destabilised.
Nick Irzyk’s work has followed processes that dissect physical media –cutting up walls and splicing pieces of foam core– literally hacking and reassembling artefacts of tangible reality into something not necessarily new, but changed under the artist’s hand. It can be seen as an exploration of physicality and space, at levels available to our natural perceptions and those we can only understand through a microscope—or not at all.
As is often the case with concepts this abstract, there exist few linguistic methods to illustrate how beguiling and absorbing thinking in these terms can be. Here the role of the artist comes into play, bringing with it the way art, like music –to quote Leonard Berstein– can name the unnamable, and communicate the unknowable.
Distilled more towards traditional painting, Nick’s more recent work brings us into an abstract space that can be felt as microscopic and topographic. On first inspection we might believe the initial construction process is underpinned by data sets, possessing a distinct sense of structure that holds together a flowing, organic anarchy. This illusory sensation suspends us between theory and fantasy as we struggle to comprehend an alien, molecular world, a place where language fails and systems break down.
In a work like ‘Cathedral’ the entire canvas is given over to this realm of quantum perpetuity. The viewer’s perspective is from within a structure that seems both infinite and claustrophobic at the same time, one of numerous contradictory situations Nick has created. Geometry and space are illustrated through thick black wireframe lines, between which coloured tiles sit. Within the anonymity of the work we find an allusion to a touchstone of modernist painting –the grid– though collapsed through a melted, Gorky-esque informality.
In this work a blue-ish hue suggests the coolness of technology, the lonely glow of the cosmos, but in an insightful artistic stroke adds texture and grit to the tiles –the dirt of a city marked by human life– or perhaps each tile is a micro painting in itself. Through this echo of human nature and connection, we experience a strange comfort in the void, a sense of warmth and familiarity grafted from Paul Klee or Sol LeWitt.
The convergence of alien abstraction and humanity is more pronounced in ‘The Caustic Season’, where a similar configuration of tiles forms a landscape of rolling hills, divided into dozens of agricultural plots. At the horizon line the landscape drops away into what we shall call a sky, replete with a rising sun. This is however one reading of the work, and in Nick’s world of uncertainty of even what order of magnitude the viewer is residing in, nothing is that simple. Back in the subatomic realm the sun is a single photon, the tiled undulation a spectrographical expression of quantum space, its form caught in the ripple of a frequency operating on an impossibly small scale.
The dialogue of disparate magnitudinal scales is to our own particle brains profound, and deeply alluring. It asks questions of our location within them, or perhaps more importantly how many locations we can occupy at once.
In the combination of our physical bodies, the super highways of energetic impulses that guide us, our brainwaves and depth of imagination, we are described by Nick’s paintings—enormous, tiny, as infinite and endlessly complex as the universe itself.
Daniel Mackenzie
January 2023
CV
Nick Irzyk
Born: 1988, Massachusetts, USA.
Lives and works in Brooklyn.
Education
2014 - MA, Fine Arts. Virginia Commonwealth University.
2012 - BA, Fine Arts. Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Solo and Duo Exhibitions
2023 - KDR305, Miami.
2023 - Marvin Gardens, New York.
2023 - PM/AM, London.
2023 - My Pet Ram, New York.
2018 - Columbus Property Management, New York.
2018 - Chin Up Bar, Baltimore.
2018 - No Place Gallery, Ohio.
2017 - Syracuse University, Syracuse.
2016 - 247365, New York.
2016 - 106 Green, New York.
Group Exhibitions
2023 - Nexx Asia Art Centre, Taipei.
2022 - PMAM, London.
2022 - My Pet Ram, Santa Barbara.
2022 - Ruschman Gallery, Chicago.
2022 - Pari Passu Gallery, New York.
2022 - Afternoon Projects, Vancouver.
2021 - Mana Contemporary, Jersey City.
2020 - Galerie Agustina Ferreyra, Puerto Rico.
2020 - Sugarlift, New York.
2019 - Over Under Room, New York.
2019 - Serious Topics, Los Angeles.
2019 - 56 Henry, New York.
2018 - The Pit, Glendale.
2018 - Best Western, New York.
2018 - St. Charles Projects, Baltimore.
2018 - Essex Flowers, New York.
2018 - Underdonk, New York.
2017 - Rover Gallery, Chicago.
2017 - CGK, Copenhagen.
2017 - Catbox Contemporary, New York.
2017 - YUI Gallery, New York.
2017 - Manchester Community College, Connecticut.
2015 - Motel, New York.
2014 - Anderson Gallery, Richmond.
2014 - Boston Cyberarts Gallery, Boston.
2014 - QSM, New Bedford.
2014 - City College College of San Francisco, San Francisco.
2014 - New Bedford Art Museum, Color Code, New Bedford.
2014 - Hiestand Gallery, Ohio.
Residencies
2019 - Keyholder Resident, Lower East Side Printshop, New York.
