About
Miguel Nelson (b. 1967, Tucson, Arizona) is a Los Angeles-based artist working across painting, sculpture, performance, architecture, film, and collaborative forms. Across these modes he is interested in the ways objects, bodies, images, and constructed environments accumulate meaning through their proximity to one another, and his work tends to occupy an unstable territory between the artificial and the real.
He has painted continuously since 2016, beginning with a series developed from photographs of geological formations in the Southwestern United States, the Mediterranean and Mexico, which treat these formations less as landscape than as isolated presences shaped by scale, surface and the behavior of paint. In 2020 he completed a pair of eighteen-foot paintings for the Railway Exchange Building in Chicago, conceived in relation to one another and to the room.
His current work takes a different source. It begins with fleeting images photographed from films, often scenes with little narrative importance or context, projected loosely onto heavy linen, where they serve less as subjects to be reproduced than as provisional structures for the paint. Figures, furniture and ordinary objects move in and out of legibility, often carrying comparable weight. Nelson removes sequence, dialogue and resolution from the images he takes; recognition remains possible, but rarely complete.
Alongside the paintings, in 2025 Nelson initiated Rudy Caballero, an ongoing collective fiction in which participants make work collaboratively and attribute it to an imaginary artist, first shown at LOOT Gallery in Mexico City during Zona Maco.
Nelson received his MFA from California College of Arts and Crafts, now California College of the Arts, in San Francisco in 2002. His early practice centered on performances and installations in which food, music, film, hospitality, architecture and social choreography were treated as materials. Much of this work unfolded at Marvimon, while related projects were presented at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House and High Desert Test Sites, and on commission from the Fellows of Contemporary Art. Over time, these projects expanded in duration and scale.
Beginning in 2004, Nelson also began transforming buildings and landscapes themselves into long-term works, developing environments that brought together architecture, gardens, furniture, artworks, performances, sound, food and social use over many years. Marvimon, SmogShoppe, Millwick, Valentine and Grass Room, Flora Chang, Desert Island and, most recently, 42!, Nelson’s own residence, showroom and studio, grew from this approach, often through extensive collaboration with artists, designers, builders and other makers.