Penumbra | Nicole Havekost

Based in Rochester, Minnesota, Nicole Havekost’s practice centers on the female body, which she reimagines as a sovereign organism that is simultaneously exquisite and abject. Havekost’s series of drawings in Penumbra represent a new direction for the artist. The works on paper are painstakingly layered in graphite, pastel and graphite putty and perforated by hand to create hundreds of delicate marks in a poetic representation of corporeality. Also included in the exhibition are new sculptures and wall reliefs that abstract and magnify parts of the female body in constructions built with sewn felt, pastels, beeswax, crushed stone and salt. Ripe with raw physicality, these works draw from the bold materiality of Eva Hesse and the timeless forms of Louise Bourgeois. For them as as for Havekost, art and life are inseparable.

Nicole Havekost lives and works in Rochester, Minnesota. She earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the University of New Mexico. She has exhibited extensively throughout the United States including recent solo and two-person exhibitions at the Rochester Art Center, Minnesota (2023), South Bend Museum of Art (2023), Catherine F. Murphy Gallery, St. Catherines’s University (2023) ,Minneapolis Institute of Art (2021) and Morris Graves Museum of Art in California (2019).

Gallery Hours:
Wed-Sat 12-5pm 

Image: (Detail) Nicole Havekost. Trickle, 2024. Graphite, graphite putty and soft pastel on rag paper