New Delhi, Oct 14 Peter Nagy, American artist and founder of Nature Morte, died after a long illness late Tuesday night, the gallery said in a statement.
He was 67.
Nagy, who championed Indian contemporary art as a gallerist, founded Nature Morte in Delhi in 1997.
“He lived exactly as he chose: fearlessly, irreverently and wildly free. He had no patience for convention for its own sake, and endless patience for ideas, for artists and for the people he loved. He made the art world more daring, more generous and far more interesting,” the official statement read.
Known for his post-conceptual art of the 1980s and as an artist, he founded Gallery Nature Morte in New York’s East Village in 1982 with artist Alan Belcher.
After the New York gallery shut its doors in 1988, Nagy moved to India in 1992 and established Nature Morte in Delhi in 1997 as a “space run for artists”.
In India, he furthered his experience of post-1960s exhibition culture in New York where galleries actively helped shape artistic production and critical discourse.
“Peter was always an artist first. When he made India his home, he brought that same spirit with him and built the gallery into one of the defining institutions of contemporary art in South Asia.
“For more than four decades he championed artists with a rare combination of rigour, instinct and loyalty, believing in them long before others did and nurturing them without pause,” the gallery said.
Nature Morte, which moved homes from Neeti Bagh in 2003 to Dhan Mill during the Covid pandemic, opened in a new space in Gulmohar Park last month, marking 30 years of operations.
The gallery noted that it was Nagy’s wish that it should “not close its doors in mourning when the time came”.
“To him, an exhibition was never about the gallery. It belonged to the artist who had poured themselves into it and to everyone who came to see it.
“He believed an artist’s moment should never be put on hold, and that the truest way to honour a life given to art is to keep showing it. Respecting his wishes, our doors remain open,” it said.
(PTI News)
