Nick Doyle Examines Greed and Excess in 'American Blues'

Perrotin Tokyo is playing host to a new solo exhibition by American artist Nick Doyle. Entitled American Blues, the show comprises of a series of large-scale works made of denim and macabre sculptures that examine how some of the US’ biggest industries have historically been tied to systems of oppression.

This is the sixth time Doyle has exhibited with Perrotin and his first within Japan. Emblematic of his career thus far, the Brooklyn-based artist continues to employ instantly recognizable forms of American iconography — Coca Cola vending machines, a US wall socket, slot machine keychains chained to car keys — using denim as his choice material to create supersized wall-mounted artworks that appear soft and alluring, but withold a dark understory.

Despite its origins in Nîmes, France, denim is symbolically one of the most American materials, thanks in due part to the myriad ads and celebrities who have donned denim garments — from the cowboys in Marlboro ads to Marlon Brando and Beyoncé. Similar to the tobacco industry, denim was another major slave economic industry, as it was tied to the production of cotton and indigo. “I often think about what it means to be an American,” Doyle previously said in a past show. “My thoughts always bring me back to concepts of shame. Consumer culture is built from shame,” the artist added.

Expanding off his last show, Yes Daddy, at Perrotin in 2022, Doyle created a small figure of a suited man laid brazenly with a bag over its head like a marionette with the naivety of Wile E. Coyote. Entitled More, the work is part of Doyle’s Executive Toys series, which is a commentary into “masculinity in its self-pitying stage,” wrote critic Max Lakin, probing into the wounded defensiveness of men in power amidst the self realization of their own fraudulence.

American Blues will be on view in Tokyo until April 27.

Perrotin
6 Chome-6-9 Roppongi,
Minato City, Tokyo 106-0032, Japan