Perrotin Paris is proud to present Now What? Or What Else?, the debut solo exhibition in Paris by acclaimed American artist Nina Chanel Abney. Shaped by the emotional aftermath of sustained crisis, this new body of work speaks to what it feels like to live in a world where collapse is ongoing, not exceptional. The exhibition reflects not only ecological disaster, but the broader psychic toll of political dysfunction, cultural absurdity, and social fatigue. The environmental imagery functions less as documentation and more as metaphor. In the shadow of authoritarian resurgence, climate denial, and the normalization of chaos, the show quietly asks: how do we keep going?
The fire has already started. The flood has already come. We saw the alerts, we made the images, we sounded the alarms. And still, here we are. Scrolling. Sleeping. Drifting. Trying to make dinner.
Abney’s practice has long blurred the lines between humor and horror, figuration and abstraction, public spectacle and private psychology. In this new series, her bold, graphic compositions depict a surreal kind of everyday life: couples in bed beside mounds of laundry, picnics unfolding in poisoned air, grocery carts filled with existential dread. Forests burn in the background. Oil rigs sit just beyond the beach. Sunbathers float beside dead fish. The world continues, but something is deeply off. And no one flinches.
Rather than capturing catastrophe at its peak, Now What? Or What Else? turns inward. It centers the dullness, detachment, and quiet repetition that now define our shared emotional climate. The urgency has shifted. People know too much and feel too little. These paintings do not scream. They linger. They witness. They endure.
If French surrealism once used dream logic to unlock unconscious desire, Abney’s work uses daily life to expose an equally irrational world. Her compositions echo the strangeness of modern existence: emoji-like faces with no expression, danger dressed up as design, bright colors hiding exhaustion. The result is a visual language that feels familiar yet unnerving, playful but disquieting.
This is not the beginning of the end. It is somewhere in the middle. After the noise. Before the reckoning.
When the question is no longer what’s happening,
But: Now what? Or what else?
This is now a breaking point. It is the blur that follows. After the urgency fades. Before the truth sets in. A world numbed by repetition, still pretending to function. Everything is normal, and nothing is right.
Born in 1982 in Harvey, IL, USA
Lives and works in New York, USA
Nina Chanel Abney was born in 1982 in Illinois, USA. She lives and works in New York.
Combining representation and abstraction, Abney's paintings and works on paper capture the frenetic rhythm of our contemporary society. Abney broaches the social-political subjects of our time in a striking and accessible way. Her compositions filled with symbolic forms, as well as her use of color, pay homage to Matisse, and take inspiration from Cubists such as Picasso and Léger. Abney is also influenced by the synesthetic sensitivities of the Harlem Renaissance greats, such as Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence.
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