16 April 2015 sees the opening of Poetic Images, an exhibition of portfolios, prints and gouache studies by George Nama produced in collaboration with Alfred Brendel and Charles Simić, at Maestro Arts, London.

When Alfred Brendel, pianist and writer discovered George Nama’s etchings in an exhibition in Switzerland, he bought a portfolio and after meeting the artist in New York, went on to produce three books with him. These portfolios, Devil’s Pageant, Thirteen Angels, and Drawing the Bow and two portfolios by American Pultzer Prize winner Charles Simić, Invisible World and Eternities, form the basis of an exhibition of Nama’s work at Maestro Arts, London.

Nama has made books all his life. Starting in 1966 when he was working in Paris with William Hayter at Atelier 17, he put together a book on the Metro, bursting with drawings and collages, hand stitched and bound. He has since created hundreds of books filled with drawings and collages. Many of these are constructed from found objects and antique books. The pages are primed before painting with gouache or drawing with charcoal.

The Portfolios are produced in a limited editions usually of thirty-two. Each is an artwork: a boxed, handmade collection of limited edition prints on arches vellum paper, signed by the author. In preparing for a portfolio, Nama produces a series of ‘original artworks’, responding through drawings and gouaches, to the text, to the flow of handwriting, a fragment of a headline, a name, an object, a dedication. His works, like poetry, send thoughts in unexpected directions, connecting remote layers of associations. The fragments of reality in an old book, just visible beneath the artwork ignites a vision of shapes that belong to a vastly different realm.

Yugoslavian born American Poet Laureate, Charles Simić, wrote the introductions to Nama’s exhibitions and in Nama tradition became a friend and collaborator in due time. Charles Simić, on George Nama.

“one goes back to his images as one goes back to poems that our emotions and our intellect do not seem to be able to exhaust…he sets traps for our eyes and our minds, Nama does it with the assurance of a master, an artist who has already made many beautiful and memorable works of art over the years.”

Nama’s subject is the naked human body and our infinite fascination with it; the works are figuratively based. They don’t show the world as it exists but as something that might exist. Not in the sense of real objects, but parts of them, a torso and a wing, for example are united with disparate elements.