Robert Nava

Robert Nava was born in East Chicago, Indiana, in 1985, and grew up in a steel-mill town on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. He took a BA at Indiana University Northwest in 2008 and an MFA in painting at Yale in 2011, then spent several years driving a truck and working other jobs while painting. He lives and works in New York.

The paintings are populated by a recurring bestiary: sharks, angels, dragons, wolves, tigers, chimeras assembled from parts that do not belong together. They are drawn with a heavy, unhesitating line in spray paint, acrylic, china marker and grease pencil, on grounds left largely bare. Nothing is corrected. Anatomy is approximate, scale is inconsistent, teeth and claws are oversized, and the figures often look out of the canvas directly at the viewer.

The apparent crudeness is the result of a decision rather than a limitation, and Nava is explicit about the lineage he is working in — Dubuffet above all, and a broader company of painters who, by academic standards, cannot paint. Yale trained him to a level of competence he then had to unlearn; the work he makes now moves at the speed of a child's drawing precisely because that speed is where the energy is. What survives the speed is a kind of ferocity, and an emotional directness that more careful painting tends to sand away.

Myth is the other ground the work stands on. The creatures come from no single tradition but read as though they should: they carry the visual authority of things carved on temples or painted on shields, without belonging to any of it. Angels appear as often as monsters, and are no gentler. What the paintings stage is not a story but an encounter — a figure of uncertain intention, arriving at speed, at close range.

Scale does much of the work. The canvases are often large enough that the creatures meet the viewer at something close to life size, and the bare grounds give them nowhere to recede to; the effect is frontal and unavoidable. Nava works across several surfaces at once and keeps the tools deliberately ordinary — the same spray cans and grease pencils available to anyone — so that nothing in the making is hidden or specialised. The paintings show every decision, including the ones that went wrong, and that visible fallibility is a large part of why they hold attention.

Nava has had solo exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid in 2024, at the Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg in 2023, and at The Watermill Center in 2022, and shows with Pace Gallery in New York, London, Seoul and Tokyo. His work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the National Gallery of Australia, the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, among others.

SELECTED CV

Born 1985, East Chicago, IN, USA

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Education and Training

2011 MFA, Painting, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

2008 BA, Fine Art, Indiana University Northwest, Gary, IN, USA

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2026 Supercharger, Pace Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

2025 After Hours, Pace Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2023 Tornado Rose, Pace Gallery, Seoul, South Korea

2022 Thunderbolt Disco, Pace Gallery, London, United Kingdom

2022 Bloodsport, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, USA

2021 Robert Nava, Pace Gallery, East Hampton, NY, USA

2021 Angels, Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2021 Robert Nava, Pace Gallery, Palm Beach, FL, USA

2020 Robert Nava, Sorry We're Closed, Brussels, Belgium

2019 Mythologies, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark

2019 Vs, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, USA

2018 Robert Nava, Sorry We're Closed, Brussels, Belgium

2015 I'm Rubber, You're Glue, ThreeFourThreeFour Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Museum and Institutional Exhibitions

2024 Robert Nava (solo), Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain

2023 Mirror Quest (solo), Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, Derneburg, Germany

2022 STAND (solo), The Watermill Center, Water Mill, NY, USA

Selected Public and Institutional Collections

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, USA

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX, USA

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA

Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL, USA

Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL, USA

Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL, USA

Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA, USA

Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, USA

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Paris, France

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia