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Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Nina Chanel Abney, Toss and Turn, 2025

Toss and Turn, 2025

Acrylic and spray paint on canvas
84 x 84"
© Nina Chanel Abney
Toss and Turn captures a moment of physical stillness paired with psychological disarray. Two figures lie in bed, turned away from each other, their twisted postures conveying discomfort, avoidance, and...
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Toss and Turn captures a moment of physical stillness paired with psychological disarray. Two figures lie in bed, turned away from each other, their twisted postures conveying discomfort, avoidance, and emotional exhaustion. The bed, a symbol typically associated with rest or intimacy, becomes a fraught and unsettled space. There is no ease here—only quiet chaos.

The room is filled with visual noise. Symbols like rings, paperclips, and abstract forms float throughout the composition like unresolved thoughts or intrusive memories. These elements mimic the clutter of an overstimulated mind and reflect the inner turmoil that makes rest impossible. Even the repetition of patterns and the layering of shapes over pillows and bodies echo the looping, spiraling nature of sleeplessness.

But the disarray is not just interpersonal. These are private burdens shaped by the traumatic world we have been living in. The figures carry more than relational tension—they carry the weight of collective exhaustion, fractured trust, political violence, and economic instability. The inability to sleep becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of shutting out a world in crisis. Emotional unrest is heightened, not contained, by the domestic space.

This painting contributes to the exhibition’s meditation on everyday life under pressure. It asks what happens when even the most intimate spaces become sites of performance, rupture, and quiet unraveling. The flat, graphic style plays with artifice, while the emotional density of the scene reveals the cost of holding it all together.

Toss and Turn is less about sleep and more about survival. It is about the fragility of connection, the ways we carry the world into bed with us, and how rest becomes yet another thing we are left to fight for.
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Exhibitions

'Now What? Or What Else?', Perrotin Paris, September 6 - October 11, 2025.

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