“O Blue come forth / O Blue arise / O Blue ascend / O Blue come in.” These invocations to pure color as portal and protagonist resound at the beginning of Derek Jarman’s monochromatic experimental film Blue. Shot in 1993, as the artist’s vision was declining due to the debilitating effects of HIV/AIDS-related cytomegalovirus retinitis, Blue was Jarman’s last work. With its commitment to queer abstraction and the expressive potentials of chroma, Blue furnishes a key reference point for Nancy Brooks Brody’s breathtakingly beautiful exhibition Ode. Comprising seven pieces, the show, now on view at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, is a spare, lyrical glimpse into their exquisitely careful methods of making and, as with Jarman’s film, a testament to the power of art created in the face of illness. Brody succumbed to ovarian cancer, at the age of sixty-one, in December 2023, and the works here were crafted in the final year, indeed the final days, of their life.

Each piece in the exhibit features two ovoid forms composed of torn tissue paper; monumental in appearance, they float one atop the other, hugging the edges of the raw canvas to which they are affixed. Ranging in size from an intimate twelve inches high to a nearly human-scale five feet tall, these tissue-paper paintings command the small gallery space with their rigorous attention to the lure of saturated colors that at times bleed or buckle. All the canvases are hung vertically, and in all except the final piece, Joy, For Joy (2024), a black oval fills the bottom half, while a colored oval dominates the upper register. We encounter daffodil-egg-yolk yellow, poppy-cardinal-crimson, slate-cloud-ocean gray. But descriptors that draw only from the natural world are inadequate, for Brody’s yellow also has an industrial feel, and their blue is almost chemically vivid. This touch of flamboyance around hue serves to highlight the work’s compositional restraint. The artist used ink to dye plain white sheets of tissue paper for the largest works, and the black has an unusual velvety depth that plays off its companion colored form, which reveal the grain of the canvas beneath. Read More