Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present a solo booth of the Mexican, Hanover-based artist, Isabel Nuño de Buen.

The work of Isabel Nuño de Buen is ambitious, if not in terms of scale, then definitely in scope. Incorporating sculpture, drawing and installation, she makes allegorical portraits of both the self and human civilization as an ongoing, multifarious and incompletable project. As such, hers is an essentially fragmented practice, which is characterized by a sense of fluctuating open-endedness, and which always gestures toward a much larger, ever-evolving, and unknowable whole.

For her solo booth at FIAC, Nuño de Buen will concentrate on her codex series first presented at the Hanover Kunstverein in 2020. These discrete, multilayered wall works, which bring to mind three-dimensional palimpsests, heraldic shields, or archeological fragments, consist of papier maché armatures. The armatures are then outfitted with a variety of materials which includes documents or letters, strips of gauze, dyed textiles, hand-made yarn, sutured drawings on transparent paper, as well as flat, plate-like segments of glazed ceramics, the whole tied together like gift or a package with string, strips of drawing and gauze. Stacked and condensed, these codices want to be if not literally, then figuratively unpacked. There is the sense that the codices are conundrums which, if properly unpacked and studied, would at once disclose and erase their own mysteries; their semi-inscrutable promise of intelligibility and meaning becoming an allegory of both the self and civilization. Far from literal or didactic, the work, and its multiple, potential significations, plays with and exists on the threshold of comprehension, much like former civilizations and our future selves exist on the threshold of our understanding, but ultimately remain just beyond our grasp.