Peter Nagy, Artist and Gallerist Who Shaped Two Art Scenes, Dies at 66
This week, we honor a fixture of New York and New Delhi art, a painter who folded the world into abstraction, and a champion of Denver’s scene.
In Memoriam honors those we recently lost in the art world.
Peter Nagy (1959–2026)
Artist and gallerist who shaped art scenes in New York and New Delhi
He co-founded the East Village gallery Nature Morte in 1982, one of the earliest artist-run galleries in the neighborhood, which showed artists such as Louise Lawler, Gretchen Bender, and Keith Sonnier during its six-year run. He fell in love with India and its art in 1992, reopening Nature Morte in New Delhi five years later, helping to build the city's gallery system. In 2016, he co-founded the influential Lower East Side gallery Magenta Plains.
An accomplished artist in his own right, his post-conceptualist work merged painting with photocopy technology. International Survey Condominiums (1985), for instance, wove art-historical timelines with museum floorplans. His work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and more.
"Art may always be about art," Nagy wrote in a catalog essay, "but the best is also about life and life seems to be about themes which take us in and out of ourselves, on travels far away and ultimately back home again."
