Lot 7

The Mirage series continues Nick Ostoff’s iterative, serial methodology working with a single, pictorial motif. Most of the paintings in the series are based on found photographs of swimming pools, collected years ago, self-reflexively echoing an earlier phase of Ostoff’s artistic practice, and simultaneously pointing to an even more distant elsewhere, and elsewhen. As the title implies, the scene presented in these paintings is at a remove, and largely illusory. Less interested in lifelike representation, Ostoff’s aim is to approximate a quality of image as filtered through memory, utilizing the painting process to make each scene feel subtly defamiliarized, just out of reach. If the dominant mood of this work is nostalgic, it has an ambiguously anxious register — nostalgia both for a now-foreclosed past, and for the surety of how we used to think the future would unfold.