Nils Nova: Works So Far

Nils Nova takes the idea of trompe l’oeil to an extreme, very conceptual place in his first comprehensive monograph to date. Imagine a photo of the gallery you’re in, blown up to life size and placed in exactly the same spot as the real-life space. You’re walking into a wall that looks like the space behind it. In his outstanding and insightful essay, Max Wechsler comments that it is not just the imposing dimensions of the work that disarm the imagination, but the succession of mirror images that throws off the viewer’s sense of what’s real and what’s not. Eventually, even a real photograph hanging on a real wall starts to look like an illusion floating in space. This extensively illustrated publication invites the viewer into Nova’s oddly parallel universe.