“My grandfather's closet was always full of surprises – just like him. Between his designer clothes, shoes and accessories, a full palette of colors unfolded.The title Ripped hints at our relationship - the complicated role he played in my life being both a creative force and an intense presence. In my work, I explore different textures of his personality and how they relate to the woman I became - my own need for emancipation, my moments of rapture and vulnerability.”– Dana Nechmad
Mandy Zhang Art is pleased to present Ripped, Dana Nechmad’s first solo exhibition in the UK curated by Tamar Dresdner. Running from 22 April to 22 June 2025, the exhibition will showcase a new series of works by the New York-based visual artist. Ripped serves as a kind of requiem for Nechmad’s grandfather. Through paintings and textile works made from her grandfather’s designer jackets, the artist engages in an ongoing dialogue with him. The work reflects on power in its various forms, both visible and invisible, while Nechmad's process confronts her own desire to understand it and her simultaneous fear of it.
At the heart of Ripped is the body’s physicality, its absence, and its dissolution from its potential. The grandfather's jackets, suspended from the ceiling, function as ghosts and memory objects, echoing the absent body. The artist views a jacket as both armor and a means of constructing an identity—one that is projected into the world, often at odds with the person’s true self.
Nechmad alters the inner linings of the jackets, tearing some fabrics, replacing others with materials she dyed or embroidered herself. The contradictions of embroidery—unifying yet wounding—serve as a reminder that the body is both an arena of pain and violence and a site of healing and pleasure. This corporal notion also permeates Nechmad’s paintings, as does the monochromatic color palette of the fabrics.
The delicate, invisible line that is drawn in the exhibition space and attempts to trace the relationship between body and soul, between the pulse of life and the moment of death, stretches between the jackets and the paintings. It seems as if the jackets have momentarily taken on the characteristics of birds and are flying in the air, while the paintings seem to "crash" on the white wall, similar to the birds painted on them.
Nechmad turns to her family’s past both to preserve parts of it and to free herself from it, moving forward. Her oscillation between realistic painting and abstraction signals her desire to break free from the traditional painting she studied in Florence and embrace a more liberated approach. This constant negotiation between the two styles, as well as the movement between times, runs through all her work. Like a winding river, memory is elusive, twisting and turning, difficult to grasp.
Text by Tamar Dresdner, curator
