New location, three new sculptors
Whether they’re swirling paint across a canvas or traveling the world searching for inspiration, the artists of Pippin Contemporary are quite a vigorous bunch. Our latest move is a literal leap across town: we’re relocating our gallery to 200 Canyon Road in early May. The new space has more elbow room both inside and out, and we’re wasting no time in growing our stable to fill it. We’re proud to introduce four sculptors who share our passion for motion, and whose dynamic works will greet every visitor who strolls through our sculpture garden. Meet Nic Noblique, Greg Reiche and Troy Pillow:
Nic Noblique
Nic Noblique may be in his 30s, but the Clyde, Texas sculptor is in the midst of his second successful career. By his early 20s, he’d already owned and operated skate and snowboarding retail shops across the country, placed in the first-ever X Games for snowboarding, and designed indoor and outdoor skate and snow parks and an innovative center point concave skateboard. When he left for the world of fine art, he set out on a mission that was just as radical.
“It’s not about making a political statement or regurgitating a bygone aesthetic or art movement,” he says. “My art is about form, lines and movement from the depths of my imagination that engage the environment in an organic way.”
Nic flattens heavy salvaged steel with tools he designed himself and twists them into elegant shapes that look like ramps for zero gravity skateboards. “I want my sculpture to play a visual trick, a balancing act, and contradict the very nature of the material I use to produce it,” he says.
Greg Reiche
Greg Reiche grew up in Socorro, New Mexico and now lives in Santa Fe. He started selling handmade jewelry and furniture at 16 and ran his own tax business after college. Art kept calling him back, so he combined his business skills and his love of sculpture in an Albuquerque gallery venture. That’s where he met his wife, who applied for a job at the gallery. After 14 years of bouncing between mediums to pay the bills, Greg sold the gallery to focus on sculpture in 1997. The results have been quite literally monumental.
Greg has won public art commissions in New Mexico and beyond, building sculptures as tall as 35 feet that weigh thousands of pounds. Using stone, metal and glass, he constructs enormous wedges, arcs, circles and portals that interact with their surroundings in spectacular ways. A project he did for a ski resort in Colorado includes a gate that changes color with the temperature, shifting as the seasons change.
The sculptures on show at Pippin Contemporary’s new location won’t be quite as large, but they’ll incorporate the same elements as his monumental works. “Beautiful, timeless and elemental, these forms are basic building blocks of our collective visual language,” Greg says. “I am drawn to them for their deep, innate emotional resonance.”
Troy Pillow
Seattle-based sculptor Troy Pillow has owned and operated his own sculpture studio since 1995. He studied architectural engineering at the University of Colorado, a background that’s easily traced in the graceful lines of his precisely balanced, often asymmetrical forms.
“I incorporate metals and glass into my sculptures—materials taken from the earth—and refine them into elegant curves, giving the feeling of movement in their static rest,” Troy says. The sculptor resolutely deconstructs and abstracts, creating objects with a powerful gestalt and a strong modernist aesthetic.
Many of Troy’s sculptures incorporate kinetic factors that move with every slight shift in the wind. “My pieces create a union of ease between modern design and nature, blending fluidly with their environment and the elements,” he says.
You can experience all of our artists’ work at our new location in early May, and follow every step of the move on our Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest accounts. Don’t blink! At Pippin Contemporary, things are always moving fast.
(Published October 2016) This weekend is the Canyon Road Paint & Sculpt Out, a lively event where artists demonstrate their creative process along historic Canyon Road. Artists bring paint, clay, fire, glass, easels and more to this event, and give visitors an interactive art experience as they involve onlookers with their process. Autumn is a beautiful time of year in Santa Fe with sunny blue skies and crisp mountain air, providing a brilliant backdrop for the event.
© Aleta Pippin
(Posted May 2013) Here at Pippin Contemporary, we are ecstatic to announce our move to Canyon Road! We are working diligently to prepare for all the changes our new space will bring. Canyon Road is an internationally known art district; in fact what once began as a rural neighborhood of small farms has become an art Mecca. People travel from all over the world to see The Road’s first-class art offerings, and we are thrilled to soon be in the thick of it all.
