Nina Rodin

Nina Rodin is a Swiss-Danish artist currently residing in a tiny village in Switzerland.

Swiss-Danish artist Nina Rodin started a degree in astrophysics at the age of 17 and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Oxford at the age of 21. While she has been a full time artist for the past 13 years with solo shows in, amongst other places New York, London, Berlin, Maastricht and Geneva and an MA in Painting from the Slade school of fine art in London, her work as an artist is infused with scientific methodology and a fascination for the astronomical complexity of the human mind, and the near infinite capacity of the brain for individuality and creativity.

Nina Rodin holds a Danish passport, grew up in France, studied in London, Spain, Denmark and Italy, and has now settled in a tiny village in Switzerland where she founded a pioneering artist’s residency. The Trélex model that has since been replicated in the Peruvian Amazon, Paris and Istanbul. She has hosted more than 150 artists in her own home and is an eloquent advocate for the arts. She has written two theses on the definition of Art and given several university lectures on reproducibility in art, science and philosophy.

Rodin’s work is colourful, mesmerising and complex. Over the years, it has spanned various media, ranging from print, photography, sculpture to large-scale installation and performance.

Her interest in science influences both the methodological approach central to her artistic practice and the choice of materials. For example, in her origami work, the butterflies reference early scientific collections and an elemental form of data gathering, driven more by wonder and obsession than real logic or understanding. The arrays of up to one thousand elements, all more or less subtly different from one another offer a dizzying display of the near infinite possible permutations the human mind can create. But each is precisely pinned into a phyllotaxic Fibonacci Spiral with entomological conservation pins, a mathematical function chosen by Rodin for two reasons: all the butterflies are equidistant and it’s an open system - one more or one less butterfly and they would still be in a democratic circular arrangement. In a sense, each butterfly represents an individual, beautiful and different from all the others.

In her series of Self-portraits with failed projects, Rodin uses the classic format of the painted self-portrait where, traditionally, young men gaze at themselves very seriously in a mirror while holding a brush in front of their easel. Here the painter is only symbolically evident in the laborious application of paint to canvas and the artist herself is entirely obliterated by her own - failed - work. She adopts the attitude of the geisha, a subtle but often misunderstood figure, whose art and aesthetic only was for sale but whose real power sometimes was more political through the encounters and conversations she orchestrated.

Nina's work is coming soon. click here to register your interest in her first edition.

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