Nayar received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Rhode Island. Nayar is a recipient of the Lightborne Fellowship, Aaron Siskind Fellowship and an Art Matters Foundation grant.
Works
Nayor creates large-scale photographs from sculptures constructed from found materials. After the construction is documented with a large-format camera, they are destroyed leaving only the photographic evidence. Her works intersect photography, sculpture and architecture, with projects exploring postcolonial narratives, memory, migration, informal architecture and dwellings, modernist architecture, and alternate and imagined modernities. She has been likened to a "tripped-out version of Samuel van Hoogstraten" and also compared to German artist Thomas Demand. Nayar's work has been reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Hindu, and Artforum. Her work has been described both as exhibiting "a painstaking attention to detail" in certain pieces, and in others portraying a "sense of chaos." Nayar's photographs are as much about the psychological as physical space. Her work explores the "relationship between memory and architecture while establishing a tension between the remembered and the real." Her photographs have been described as providing "a topography of the mind itself." Nayar’s more recent work blends multiple exposures from various stages of construction of a single model. This technique deepens and complicates the piece’s relationship with time. The combination is also said to be “reminiscent of Cubism's multi-perspectival dissolution of the static object.”
Selected Exhibitions
2020 THREE SPACES for TIME, Thomas Erben, New York 2019 If stone could give, Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco 2018 Peckham 24, London What's essential, Jahaveri Contemporary Aspirational Architectures, Fridman Galley 2017 Crash, Dig, Dwell, Jahaveri Contemporary Archival Alchemy, Abrons Arts Center 2016 Unsuspending Disbelief, Logan Center Gallery 2015 Constructs/Construction, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art A Room of One's Own, Yancy Richardson 2013 an axe for a wingbone, Thomas Erben, New York 2011 Thomas Erben Gallery, NY 2010 Lightborne Exhibition, Cincinnati Art Museum and Art Academy of Cincinnati 2011 School of Visual Arts, SVA Notable Female Alumni Collectors Guide, Volume 2, Chelsea Art Museum Moving Index, ArtOffice.org Manual For Treason, Sharjah Biennial 2010 Object Lessons, New York Photography Festival The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK Conspiracy’ with Raqs Media Collective and Susanta Mandal, Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata, India Hong Kong Art fair, Hong Kong, Japan Punctum II, Lakeeren Gallery, Mumbai, India 31 Women in Art Photography, Humble Arts Foundation Bring Me A Lion, Webster University, MO Accented, Bric Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY 2009 NADA Art Fair, Yamini Nayar, New Works Thomas Erben Gallery, NY, Arrested Views Galerie Anne Barrault, France Grey Noise Gallery, Pakistan, Good Looking 2008 Scope Basel, Basel, Switzerland, By All Means Stephen Stux Gallery, New York, Firewalkers Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, FA, Exploding the Lotus Thomas Erben, New York, First Left, Second Right ExitArt, New York, Spring Auction 2007 ExitArt, New York, Sultana's Dream Gallerie Barry Keldoulis, Australia, The Devotee Exhausts the Forces of Activity Rush Arts Gallery, New York – Art for Life Auction – East Hampton Benefit Queens Museum, New York, Erasing Borders 2006 Bose Pacia Modern, New York ‘Yamini Nayar and Shreshta Premnath’ Onishi Gallery, New York, The Kayu Project Kiana Malakzadeh Gallery, New York, This One Time BosePacia, New York, Friends of Fulbright India Auction 2005 Queens Museum of Art, New York Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now Prerana Reddy Rush Arts Gallery, New York, More or Less, Generation Meaning Through Process Studio Museum of Harlem, NY hrlm: pictures – video installation; PH Gallery, New York, Empire's Feast 2004 Gallery Arts India, New York, Territories PS 122, NY, 'Blow the Conch 2003 Bose Pacia, New York, Through Customs Rye Center, New York 2002 313 Gallery, New York, Black Tea Interart Annex, New York, Women in Wartime Society for Ethical Culture, New York 1999 Woods-Gerry Gallery, RI RISD Graduation Invitational RISD Red-Eye Gallery, RI, Thesis Exhibition, Detroit
