Nicola Tyson, born in London in 1960, is a British painter who currently lives and works in New York, NY, US. She attended Chelsea School of Art, St. Martins School of Art, and Central/St. Martins School of Art in London, UK.
For over three decades, Nicola Tyson’s influential explorations of embodiment and the female form have spanned not just painting, but also sculpture, drawing, and the written word.
Primarily known as a painter, Tyson has also worked with photography, film, performance and the written word. In 2023, Nicola Tyson: Selected Paintings 1993-2022 was published.
Tyson's androgynous creatures are twinned, twisted, and semi-alive.
Her work investigates what Julia Kristeva calls “the I that is not I.” The artist probes those abject features of identity and embodiment that are simultaneously threatening, unnerving, revolting-and mesmerizing.
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The artist distorts our experiences of identity and the structures which determine them-gender, sexuality, and (non-)humanity. Her biomorphic figures and painterly surfaces rattle our expectations of what bodies are, what they can do, and how they should be represented.
Working in-and sometimes ironizing-a lineage of artists that includes Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and Hans Bellmer, Tyson toys with her surfaces and the figures that emerge within them, figures which are visceral but not quite human, that are dreamlike and beguiling.
Nicola Tyson, Self-portrait: Artist and model, 2022
Early Career and Influences
Taken in the autumn of 1978 while Tyson was an eighteen-year-old student at Chelsea College of Art, the images capture the earliest genesis of the New Romantic scene that was to define the decade ahead.
"Bowie Nights at Billy’s Club" is an archive of photographs by Nicola Tyson that documented the London club scene of the late 1970s. They form a record that is at once autobiographical and social, beginning with shots from a family holiday and bearing witness to Tyson's immersion in the scene revolving around Billy's Club on Dean Street.
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In 1991, Tyson co-founded Trial Balloon, an artist-run, women-only exhibition space in Soho, NYC.
In 1993, Tyson had her first solo exhibition at Trial Balloon, a space that she established to exclusively show female artists in New York.
“Initially, feminist concerns - and theory - were my drivers. I worked conceptually, for a while, after graduating. I even ran a women-only project space in the early ‘90s, from my SoHo studio loft. I then literally shut the door on all that and turned within to work completely intuitively.
I had found my voice - which I felt was a feminist achievement in itself - and no longer wanted my imagination to be structured by theory.
Artistic Style and Themes
Tyson likes to work with fleshy peaches, tans, and browns, and to leave small segments of her canvases bare, as though the paint were a layer of lacerated or degrading skin. She works with rich, bold palettes of acrylic paint to create visual worlds that teeter at the border of mimesis and formlessness.
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Upon first glance, clownishly distorted figures read as humorous and sometimes ebullient. But their whimsy belies an arresting intensity.
Within her canvases, mannequin-like, segmented torsos glitch into abstraction, limbs unfurl like tendons or twigs, and faces devolve into fractal abstractions.
Tyson operates outside a patriarchal script of representing gender, the body, and desire, responding to Hans Bellmer, Pablo Picasso, and others by disrupting the fetishistic male gaze.
As the artist states, the act of “conjuring an uncanny presence, something that looks back at you, whilst still addressing the Modernist rules of flatness and truth to material,” remains among her most salient concerns.
Nicola Tyson, Their dog, 2019
Exhibitions and Collections
Since, she has had numerous solo shows, including at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, US; The Drawing Room, London, UK; the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH, US; Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK; and Petzel Gallery, New York, NY, US; among many others.
She has participated in group exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York, NY, US; Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK; Neue Galerie, Graz, AT, and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, US; among others.
Tyson has mounted solo shows at Petzel, New York (2024); Sadie Coles HQ, London (2021); The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St.
In 1995, she had her first solo exhibition in London at Anthony d'Offay Gallery, which was followed by a show of her drawings at Entwistle Gallery.
She has showed with Petzel Gallery, New York since 1995 and Sadie Coles HQ, London since 1999.
In 1998, she had a solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich.
In 2017, her first full scale survey exhibition was mounted at The Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis.
Tyson’s work is collected by institutions worldwide, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, US; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, US; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, US; the Tate Gallery, London, UK; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, US; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, US, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, US.
Tyson’s work is included in major collections such as Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Tate Modern, London.
Here is a table summarizing some of the institutions that hold Tyson's work:
| Institution | Location |
| Hammer Museum | Los Angeles, CA, US |
| Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | New York, NY, US |
| Museum of Modern Art | New York, NY, US |
| Whitney Museum of Art | New York, NY, US |
| Tate Gallery | London, UK |
| Walker Art Center | Minneapolis, MN, US |
| Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution | Washington DC, US |
| Museum of Contemporary Art | Chicago, IL, US |
Petzel is pleased to present I am a teapot, an exhibition of new paintings by British-born, New York-based artist Nicola Tyson, opening Thursday, January 16, 2025. The show marks Tyson’s twelfth solo exhibition with Petzel and will be on view through February 22, 2025, at Petzel, 520 West 25th Street.
Tyson’s new works fuse painterly rigor with a shrewd, quick-witted sensibility, generating complex, evocative compositions. Alluding to the 1939 nursery rhyme and its accompanying dance, “I’m a Little Teapot,” the title of the exhibition is both playful and physical, weaving two bodies of her work though the gallery.
In one set of paintings, Tyson employs a color wash to prime her canvases, building her characters around their eyes, which are left blank to reveal the raw ground. These pictures demonstrate Tyson pushing at her own boundaries, bridging tensions between freedom and restraint.
While many of Tyson’s canvases use a color wash as a foundation, in a separate set of paintings, she leaves the ground, and her figure’s eye ‘sockets,’ primed in white, further emphasizing a presence of uncanny animation before the viewer.
Following her exhibition 90s Paintings last spring, Tyson decided to further develop this technique, which she began experimenting with decades ago. Here, Tyson brings a more overtly queer drive into play, such as in “Night Interior,” which depicts two entwined figures wrestling in an erotic embrace.
Tyson adheres to an electric palette, layering visceral strokes of acrylic paint in her signature dry-brush technique, building presence in contour and line.
At times, the works illuminate aspects of the artist’s biography: for example, the eponymous painting “I Am a Teapot,” in which a figure performs the “Teapot Tip,” came to Tyson from a camp parody of the song and dance she learned as a teenager in the queer underground of 1970s London.
Nicola Tyson on "Sense of Self"
In 2011 Tyson released the limited edition book “Dead Letter Men,” a collection of satirical letters addressing famous male artists. The book was designed Peter Miles and published by Petzel Gallery, New York and Sadie Coles HQ, London.
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