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Nick Simko
Hands
2024-2025
This project is a series of photographs that depict painted details of men’s hands as represented in the collection of the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Focusing on European paintings made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these fragmentary views reveal carefully selected objects, attire, activities, and gestures that signal a specific intersectional identity formation: privileged, white, and male. These closely-framed photographs reveal both the constructedness of each sitter’s identity and the painted surface itself; demonstrating less a transparent universal subject position and more one that is tangible, corporealized, and representative of the specific frameworks of class, race, and gender.