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Mongolian artist Nomin Bold brings colorful and clever knitted gas masks to Liliana Bloch Gallery www.dallasnews.com
“I was cut off from the world. There was no one to confuse or torment me, and I was forced to become original.” Joseph Haydn said that about his nearly 30 years making music at a remote estate in Hungary, serving the Esterhazy family.
The artist Nomin Bold is isolated, too, though Ulaanbaatar, where she lives, has 1.6 million people and is the capital of Mongolia. This is a country known as the “Land of the Eternal Blue Sky” because it has so many days of sunshine every year.
Mongolia also has one of the coldest winters on Earth, and Ulaanbaatar, her lifelong home, has been called the most polluted capital in the world.
That is one reason her new show at Dallas’ Liliana Bloch Gallery features her latest venture in art: knitted gas masks. They are colorful. They are clever.
Strings of pearls, pompoms, bells, beads and big eyes made of gold or hunter green ornament these playful caps. One might wear them, minus the tube for oxygen, in freezing temperatures, but they are meant to defend against far worse than that.
Bold is well named. She takes on the issues of the times with irrefutable flair. Her true intentions, however, cannot be disguised. Bristling with wit, she says in her work exactly what she means.
She could not travel to the opening of her show in Dallas, so I meet her on a Zoom video chat, calling at 8 in the morning to catch her and her translator, a former classmate named Batjil Bayar, at 9 that night there.
Bold starts our conversation with a tight shot, showing only her head and not much more against a white ceiling with angles that suggest something interesting but reveal nothing. I ask about an object jutting out from the wall above her and learn that it is a vent hood. She is in the kitchen, and she broadens the picture to show me how it looks. From there we begin a tour of her apartment that brings her to life, with Bayar, a graduate student in archaeology, following closely.
From a sparse, austere beginning there bursts into view an abundance of art, Buddhas, lacquer cabinets, a furry wolf skin and a beautiful pitcher of copper and brass, plus a swath of blue silk fabric draped alongside a painting.
There also is a Chinese hanging that evokes Mongolia’s long, intertwined history with its neighbor to the south. Then Bold’s husband, also an artist, appears seated on a sofa, and her 17-year-old daughter is writing at a desk.
At another desk is her 14-year-old son, doing chemistry at a computer, and on the floor, another son, 3, oblivious to the co-working operation going on around him. It was after he was born that she started knitting. She says it came to her more naturally than drawing, the basis of painting, which can be stressful.
Though she lives in the land made powerful by Genghis Khan and his grandson, Kublai Khan, Bold is hardly drawn to the glory days of the 13th century. Wearing a black sweatshirt with “Manhattan 62″ emblazoned on the front and white stripes on the sleeves, she is every inch today. Her nails are painted burgundy, almost brown, and around her neck is a silver pendant.
I spot a few of her paintings from just over a decade ago. They shock in their verve and sophistication: stylish women with auras of Burberry and Louis Vuitton, one of them holding a mask. It’s theatrical and prescient, foretelling the masks now at Liliana Bloch Gallery.
Skeletons come into play in the gallery as well. They appear on a large Chinese boat, made of fabric and hanging from the ceiling, ready to ferry the departed across the River Styx. There are more skeletal figures, some painted on canvas while others adorn a tapestry made of small skulls with buttons for eyes.
It is a veritable Day of the Dead, the cheerful grotesquerie of the left-behind, and it plays as well in Mongolia as it does in Mexico. One painting offers Hieronymus Bosch for the 2020s. Female yoga practitioners sit among signs that proclaim “Club,” “Hospital,” “Stop,” “Emergency,” “Mall,” “Museum,” “War,” “Peace,” “Pet Shop.” A Coke bottle and a can of Campbell’s soup lurk among the unlucky detritus. The commentary, once you account for satirical whimsy, is devastating.
Bold is an artist coming into her own. Her work has been exhibited at Documenta, which takes place every five years in Germany, as well as in Brazil, Turkey, Australia and China.
She is part of a current exhibition in Zurich featuring Joseph Beuys and other luminaries.
Before we sign off, her husband snaps a photo of my side of the Zoom call. We wave goodbye. And the spirited, cunningly playful Nomin Bold vanishes, returning to a country of nomads and horses that still run free, close enough to the city to ride whenever she can.
Grounded in ancient territory, she has a clear eye for positioning herself and her work in the post-post-modern world. She sees what lies ahead and is doing her best to sound the alarm, with style.
Published Date:2021-11-30
