Local artist explores nostalgia with new show at 39th Street gallery

Sunset Park–based artist Friese Undine will debut a new solo exhibition, “The Living Museum of the Golden Age,” at Thomas VanDyke Gallery on 39th Street, with a reception on Oct. 11 from 6 to 8 p.m.

“Nostalgia” was first coined as a medical diagnosis, the artist pointed out during a conversation with the Sunset Post, for a serious, sometimes fatal form of homesickness observed in 17th-century Swiss mercenaries serving abroad. The definition has since shifted, but the idea of nostalgia as a pathology underlies the more than 70 compositions being displayed for the first time.

Most of the works feature a technique the artist invented himself, using metal sheets dusted with spray paint, which he painstakingly etches to create grainy, textural shading. The results are both playful and uneasy, reminders that nostalgia can airbrush the past and turn painful realities into sentimental myth: Viking-helmeted women sharing a beer, men in animal skins checking their reflections, samurai families camping in RVs.

Works are accompanied by text describing a fictional self-help movement advocating wallowing in nostalgia as a way to find happiness. “It’s just the polar opposite of what I think is a good way to try to live,” Undine said. “There’s this kind of irony that will be ambient in the show, hopefully.”

Undine cites how leaders such as Augustus once used nostalgia to consolidate power and restore a mythic past, an impulse he sees repeating across history. The longing to return to imagined golden ages, he suggests, still drives how nations and individuals understand themselves today.

“There’s a tendency towards ethno-nationalism and, therefore, exclusion in the unrestrained nostalgia,” Undine said. “Pick a group and there’s someone else they have disdain for, and that disdain helps define them. It bonds them together, and the caricature of the past helps maintain that identity.”

The show runs through Nov. 7.