The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Summer Visual Grant to Nicola Ginzel to help her with her project, “How Do You Restructure Form?”.

”How Do You Restructure Form?” is a metaphorical cleansing ritual exorcising a patriarchal pathology, whose arcane dogma—regardless of nation, culture, belief, or Age—dissolves into many possibilities. The series, maps the footprint of the prestigious Palais Equitable in Vienna, Austria. The Palais, built around 1880 for the Equitable Life Assurance Society of America, is known for housing Vienna’s oldest landmark from the Middle Ages. It is a nail-tree talisman that is said to symbolize the city’s Mythical Center.

The 65 works on paper in this series are made up of 192 frottages. By using huge sheets of 40” x 30” red carbon paper, Nicola moved succinctly around the Palais’ entire perimeter where the exterior base wall meets the ground. This initial four-month long frottage process was completed with the support of a US Fulbright Scholar Grant during a Q21 Art Residency in Vienna, Austria in 2020. Its intention was to generate frottages to serve as raw material so that they could be further transformed through mixed media. Like the nail-tree talisman, these rubbings become the container for an energetic transference.

Born in Hollywood, California, to two World War II survivors—a Viennese father who had four nationalities throughout his lifetime, and a German Jewish mother who was baptized Catholic as Hitler was gaining power—Nicola Ginzel grew up in Little Rock, AR, and has lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY, for 25 years. Both the materiality of her work and its concepts deal with transformation. Throughout most of her career works have been small scale employing processes using the hand, such as stitching and making rubbings. The famous art critic, John Yau, wrote in ‘An Artist who Turns Detritus into Talismans’ published in Hyperallergic in 2018:
Ginzel’s interest in transformation and the inherent healing power of certain materials connects her to artists as disparate as Yves Klein and James Lee Byars. I can associate what she does with a wide range of very other artists—from Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz to Joseph Cornell, Philip Hanson, and Antonin Artaud to Outsider artists—but in the end, they all fall away. Her use of sewing to draw, write, and stitch defines a territory that is all her own.

Nicola is a recipient of a 2019-20 Fulbright US Scholar Grant, which enabled her to participate in the Q21 Artist-in-Residence Program at the Museusmsquartier in Vienna, Austria, during the spring of 2020. Past residencies include SIM, The Icelandic Visual Arts Association and Reykjavik Art Museum Residency; The Skaftfell Cultural Center Residency in Seydisfjördur, Iceland; and BoxoPROJECTS in Joshua Tree, CA, where she worked together with shamen. 

Her work has been featured by select venues such as Artcritical written by Stephanie Buhmann and in Art in America written by Janet Koplos. Nicola had her first ten–year retrospective and traveling museum exhibition, ‘Language, Symbol, Artifact,’ at the Tennessee Valley Museum of Art in Tuscumbia, AL. Other select solo exhibitions have been at Cathouse FUNeral, Brooklyn, NY; The Gallery@1GAP, Brooklyn, NY; the Corridor Gallery in Reykjavik, Iceland; and FreedmanArt Gallery in New York City.

In 2021 she received the ‘Austrian American Partnership Fund,’ through the US Embassy in Vienna and her collaborative project with composer Mariella Cassar–Cordina, Sonos Civitatem, MMXX which reimagined NYC post March 2020 received additional funding from Arts Council Malta. The virtual project was initially organized through Undercurrent Gallery in Brooklyn. A current and ongoing project Gold Hands for Democracy became an Austrian Initiative through the Austrian Cultural Forum New York during spring 2022 and is supported by the Ukrainian Institute of America and 16 European Consul Generals and Cultural Institutions based in New York City.

Please visit Nicola’s Instagram for more information.