Peter Nagy, Adventurous Artist Turned Sharp-Sighted Dealer, Dies at 67

Peter Nagy, an artist who became a star of the East Village in 1980s New York before ascending as one of India’s leading art dealers in the 1990s, has died at 67. Nature Morte, the New Delhi–based gallery that he ran, said that he had battled a long illness in a statement posted to social media.

“He lived exactly as he chose: fearlessly, irreverently and wildly free,” the gallery wrote. “He had no patience for convention for its own sake, and endless patience for ideas, for artists and for the people he loved. He made the art world more daring, more generous and far more interesting.”

The arc of Nagy’s career was an unusual one. He fostered a generation of appropriation-minded artists based in New York and helped stake a claim for India’s importance to the international art world. And in his art, he found his own take on commodification and reproducibility, two notions frequently addressed by artists of his generation.

In his own practice, Nagy pondered heady subject matter related to the corporatization of art and transmission of ideas and images across the globe. His works of the 1980s borrowed corporate logos and pictures from art history textbooks, showing that everything and anything could be endlessly copied until it signified nothing much at all. These early pieces synced with the bitter mindset of the Pictures Generation of the late 1970s and early ’80s, whose artists took up appropriation as a means of testing authorship and ownership.

“People don’t have anything to express, except the trademark,” Nagy said in one interview from the early ’80s. “We’re being fed information all the time.”

Relying on his education in design, Nagy would often clip out images and collage them together, using a similar method enlisted to create paste-ups used in the creation of print media in the pre-Photoshop age. He excised elements of floor plans, art books, and advertisements, then mashed together. Often, he would then Xerox the collages, blowing them up in the process.

The works looked machine-made, even when they were not. “The irony is that they’re handmade paintings that look like they might be computer-derived,” he told ARTnews in 2020 amid a revival of interest in his art. “I was interested in the degradation of the image and the information the image contained. I also thought there was additional information to be gleaned from that degradation. I was really into this idea: making copies of copies and noticing how long the original information maintained its integrity the longer I continued.”

Nagy went on to exhibit his spare art during the mid-’80s with International with Monument Gallery, a New York space that brought early attention to Jeff Koons, Ashley Bickerton, and Peter Halley. Later, he showed with dealers Jay Gorney and Nicole Klagsbrun.

At the same time, Nagy was running Nature Morte, which he founded with Alan Belcher in the East Village in 1982. He initially ran the gallery out of an East 10th Street storefront that he and Belcher rented for $500 a month. “We had no fucking clue what we were doing, but it was small and it was easy,” Nagy said the 2020 ARTnews interview. And yet, the space would go on to make a substantive mark on 1980s New York.

Steven Parrino, an artist whose punkish paintings defiled the aesthetic purity of the modernist monochrome, had his first solo exhibition with Nature Morte in 1983, the same that Gretchen Bender, a video artist known for stealing televisual material from the airwaves, also made her debut there. Cady Noland, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Robert Gober, Richard Pettibone, and others of note also showed at Nature Morte early on before its closure in New York in 1988.

Nagy continued working as an artist in the years afterward, eventually shedding his austere black-and-white collage aesthetic to make colorful paintings and installations in the ’90s. And then, for a while, he stopped doing solo exhibitions altogether. There was a 23-year interval between his 1997 Nicole Klagsbrun show and his next New York solo show, which got considerably more notice: a 2020 Jeffrey Deitch exhibition staged in collaboration with Magenta Plains, which now represents Nagy.

At the same time, Nagy was putting down roots in India. In 1992, he relocated to New Delhi; he spent the next five years moving between that city and New York. In 1997, he formally opened Nature Morte in New Delhi.

As Nagy recalled, being an artist with any stake in the market was confusing for many observers. “I am conscious of being penalized for being a dealer: Artists aren’t supposed to be interested in the market (ha ha), and my choice is, apparently, seen by some as opportunistic and manipulative,” he wrote in Artforum in 1999. He also added, “I prefer the combination of market, media, creativity, and personality that comes together in a gallery.”

Peter Nagy was born in 1959 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He attended New York’s Parsons School of Design, studying communication design, art history, and theory; he graduated in 1981. During his time at Parsons, he began making works that he described as “large-scale, black-and-white drawings influenced by Futurism.”

He quickly ascended in the New York scene, exhibiting in the 1985 Whitney Biennial via the collective Group Material, whose installations often combined objects produced by others. That same group brought Nagy’s art to the 1987 edition of Documenta in Kassel, Germany.

Today, Nagy is best known as a dealer, with Nature Morte continuing to maintain operations in New Delhi and Mumbai. Its roster today includes giants of Indian art such as Vibha Galhotra, Subodh Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Bharti Kher, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Pushpamala N, and the Raqs Media Collective. Dayanita Singh and Vivan Sundaram also previously showed with Nature Morte. The gallery, a mainstay at fairs ranging from the Armory Show to Frieze, has previously made attempts to broaden its reach, formerly operating branches in Berlin and Calcutta.

Nagy viewed Nature Morte’s Indian iteration as a project born from the impulse toward globalism in the art world. But he also cautioned that such globalism had its downside.

Western curators, he said in a 2010 Art in America interview, “often approach Indian contemporary art with very little knowledge of India itself, so they tend to misinterpret or even ignore artists that may have great relevance to the Indian context but seemingly little to the international context. But, hey, cultural translation is one of the obvious pitfalls of the globalization of the contemporary art world.”

More recently, interest in Nagy’s art of the 1980s has grown, thanks in part to the 2020 Jeffrey Deitch show. “How amazing to discover that Nagy’s early output, which shows the artist’s penchant for mapping transformations wrought by expanded media, increased corporate power, and concentrated flows of capital, felt downright prescient today,” wrote critic Jan Avgikos in his Artforum review of that show. “Like Warhol, Nagy was practically clairvoyant in his observations about art and its commodification, the ballooning culture of the copy, and our ongoing anxieties about authenticity.”