LILIANA BLOCH GALLERY

Nomin Bold and Bataarzorig Batjargal
Chasing The Wolf

September 7th – October 26

Liliana Bloch Gallery is proud to open its 2024 fall season with a two-person exhibition entitled Chasing The Wolf featuring the works of Nomin Bold & Bataarzorig Batjargal. This will be the first Baatarzorig Batjargal exhibition in the US.

Bold and Batjargal’s body of work is an ongoing investigation and denunciation of the brutality of Mongolia’s neoliberalism policies aimed at corporate gain at the expense of people’s well-being. Both artists use Mongol Zurag (Translated as Mongolian painting) developed in the 1950s by Nyam-Osoryn Tsultem (1924-2001) to protect cultural heritage and national identity. Tsultem was key to conceptualizing an independent “national style” that connected nomadic and Buddhist cultures. Mongol Zurag was born as an act of rebellion that exists today against social realism aesthetics.

Nomin and Baatarzorig have expanded the scope and mediums of Mongol Zurag in the XXI century focusing on the taxing maladies of neoliberalism since the country transitioned to multiparty democracy in the early 1990s. Both artists use diverse mythologies and visual metaphors to convey ideas of spirituality, exploitation, tribalism, and Westernization of millenary civilizations using globalism as a weapon for greed and division between pastoral and urban societies. The exhibition title alludes to the canis lupus chanco, an endemic wolf central to the legend that ancient Mongolian people had been born from a union between the blue-gray wolf and a deer. Wolves are believed to carry the spirit of Mongolian ancestors, the link proven by the “Mongolian spot”—a bluish patch found on the lower back of most Mongolians in their infancy.

Nomin Bold’s work focuses on a critical approach to Mongolian society’s transition to modernity. The artist departs from personal experience expressing internal struggles in a generation experiencing friction between tradition and modernity. Bold’s oeuvre brings an unexpected combination of heterogeneous visual elements full of detailed references and symbols. Buddhist imagery in Nomin’s art serves as motifs and emblems of traditions placed amid contemporary commodification. Her compositions are inspired by questions about the nature of tradition and how it can be subverted, transfixed, and transformed.

Born in 1982 in Mongolia, Nomin Bold studied visual arts at the Mongolian University of Arts and Culture in Ulaanbaatar. Bold’s work has been exhibited in the 14th edition of Documenta, Kassel, Germany, Bangkok Art Biennale in 2020-2021, The 14th International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Curitiba, Brazil, 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art in Australia, the 2nd International Art Biennial in Bodrum, Turkey, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Germany, and the Dom Museum in Vienna, Austria.

The preservation of Mongolia’s cultural heritage lost through historical transformations is central to Baatarzorig Batjargal’s multi-disciplinary work. Mongolia has long experienced sustainable living and self-sufficiency being removed from the lures of capitalism by geographical remoteness and nomadic farming culture. Baatarzorig brings attention to his heritage merging Mongol Zurag, with contemporary styles. His work is an amalgam of the Mongolian mythological and spiritual world confronted with modern symbols of development. Baatarzorig addresses the contradictions of his environment and its transformation from past to present. Panning through the repressions of Soviet-style communism to the inequalities and consumerism of global capitalism, Baatarzorig offers narratives concerned with the loss of traditional heritage. In a rich tapestry of various regimes, the portraits in his recent series include gods, holy men, artists, intellectuals, warriors, noblemen, politicians, and oligarchs.

Baatarzorig studied Fine Arts at the Mongolian University of Arts and Culture in Ulaanbaatar where he resides. He had solo exhibitions at Jack Bell Gallery, in London, UK, and his group exhibitions include Contemporary Art of Mongolia (Hong Kong, 2019), Asia Pacific Triennale in Queensland (Australia, 2018), and Garibaldi Gallery in Venice, Italy. His work is in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, USA.

The gallery will host a panel discussion and book signing with Orna Tsultem, Associate Professor, Edgar, Dorothy Fehnel Chair in International Studies at Indiana University, and Lee Cullum, prominent television, radio, and print journalist who interviewed Nomin Bold during her first solo exhibition in Texas in 2021.