Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush

Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush is the first solo museum exhibition of Chicago-born artist Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982), and a 10-year survey of the artist’s provocative paintings, watercolors and collages. Unapologetically revitalizing narrative figure painting, Abney has been branded as one of the “Next Irascibles” by Paper Magazine.

As a skillful storyteller, she visually articulates the complex social dynamics of contemporary urban life. She draws on mainstream news media, animated cartoons, video games, hip-hop culture, celebrity websites and tabloid magazines to make paintings replete with figures, numbers and words that tumble onto the canvas with the immediacy of text messages, a Twitter feed or the scrolling headlines of an incessant 24-hour news cycle. By engaging loaded topics and controversial issues with irreverence, humor and lampooning satire, Abney’s works are both pointed contemporary genre scenes as well as scathing commentaries on social attitudes and inequities. Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush will include more than 50 paintings, drawings and collages and feature several of the artist’s monumental paintings.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.