Nina Chanel Abney was born in Chicago in 1982. She graduated from Parsons, in 2007, and has since had two solo exhibitions in New York. She was included in the seminal “30 Americans” exhibition, at The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, in 2008. Fred [London] Limited exhibited her work at Pulse Miami in 2009; and this exhibition at FRED, in London, will be her first international exhibition.

Abney’s paintings are mostly large, and, it seems only restricted by what will fit in to and get out of her 4th-floor apartment-cum-studio in Jersey City.

They are intense, and conspicuous, and full of strong feminine and masculine images. They are loaded with humour, and irony, and perversity, satire and fantasy, and are crammed full of cheeky, irreverent details and references. They are made-up of flat vivid colour, and rollicking cut-out Clemente-like people, drawn from her friends as well as celebrities, but which Nina has changed, often beyond recognition, by switching their race, gender and body parts - she scrutinises and analyses the sexual and racial stereotyping in our society – and perhaps this altered reality highlights something of the similarities rather than the differences between us, because, as Gary Snyder says, when you take away the environment and how it effects our behaviour and our perceptions of each other, we are all the same.