Image: Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas is presenting Nic Nicosia: Everyday Surreal, an exhibition that looks at how the Dallas artist’s practice has evolved over the past 25 years. Open through August 16, the show centers on Nicosia’s move into sculpture and drawing while tracing a return to working alone in the studio, without assistants, casts or crews.
The exhibition sits squarely within the Nasher’s mission as a museum devoted to modern and contemporary sculpture. On its website, the center describes the collection as one of the finest in the world, and its programming regularly pairs exhibitions with public tours, talks and family events. In that context, Everyday Surreal adds a local artist survey to a museum best known for framing sculpture as a broad, living field rather than a fixed medium.
According to the museum’s July email newsletter, the exhibition focuses on the last 25 years of Nicosia’s work and highlights a shift in emphasis. While his work retains what the museum calls a sense of whimsy, it has become more philosophical, exploring time, memory and the “psychological bends at the edges of everyday reality.” That framing makes the show significant beyond a single artist profile: it points to a long-running conversation in contemporary art about how images, objects and daily life can be made strange without abandoning recognizable experience.
The Nasher’s exhibition materials also note that the show includes a return to solo studio practice, a detail that gives the survey an additional layer of process-based interest. Rather than presenting the work only as finished objects, the museum positions Nicosia’s current phase as part of a broader evolution in making, with sculpture and drawing now central to how the artist works and thinks. That emphasis helps situate the exhibition within current interest in artists who cross media while maintaining a distinct visual language.
A photo caption released by the museum identifies one work shown in the installation: bighands, 2010, enlarged and cast in 2020, a stainless-steel sculpture measuring 94 by 86 by 106 inches. The caption underscores the exhibition’s scale as well as its commitment to installation display, reinforcing the Nasher’s long-standing role as a venue where sculpture is experienced in relation to space, light and the surrounding garden.
The museum is also extending the exhibition through related public programming. A sketching tour tied to Nic Nicosia: Everyday Surreal is scheduled for July 25 at 1:30 p.m., with participants encouraged to bring a notebook and pencil. The Nasher has also made available an artist talk between Nicosia and Chief Curator Jed Morse, which includes behind-the-scenes footage of the artist creating the site-specific drawing 2190 #5. These programs broaden the exhibition’s reach, turning it into not just a display but a platform for looking closely at how the work is made and interpreted.
For the wider art world, Everyday Surreal matters because it places a distinctive Dallas artist inside a major sculpture institution at a moment when museums are increasingly attentive to practice across media, studio process and the relationship between the ordinary and the uncanny. By presenting Nicosia’s recent work as both playful and philosophical, the Nasher is making a case for sculpture and drawing as tools for thinking about memory, time and perception in everyday life.
