At a time of recalibration of India–US ties in the context of trade and cultural influence, well-known American artist and gallerist settled in India, Peter Nagy, presents an exhibition titled 'America Invented Everything’ at Nature Morte. The satire embedded in the title is enough to draw the Indian viewer in. “This might be a marketing gimmick — you never know,” remarks Peter Nagy with characteristic irony. Comprising of works first exhibited in Venice in 1985, the portfolio brings together silkscreens constructed through layered electronic imagery, symbols and commercial logos. These visual fragments operate less as isolated graphics and more as components of a larger semiotic field, generating meaning through juxtaposition rather than narrative.
“Growing up as an American, you’re always told, ‘America’s the greatest country in the world.’ And you get to Italy… and you go, ‘Wow, this is a lot nicer than America. I don’t believe America invented everything. I believe that America invented very little, actually,” says Nagy. “The phrase was chosen because you want to catch people’s attention… it may be even more loaded now than in 1985.”
The exhibition brings together 11 silkscreens reproduced from works created between 1983 and 1991, when Nagy was living in New York. It revisits the 1980s culture of post-conceptual creativity; artists of this period embraced the logic of conceptual art but reintroduced image culture i.e advertising, typography, mechanical reproduction and mass media, into the field of fine art.
Nagy’s training in communication design is central to this approach. “I can’t paint like a painter. It’s all graphic design,” he notes. His earliest works, also on display, were constructed as cut-paper collages sourced from newspapers and magazines, but they were never intended as singular objects. “From the beginning, it was always like, I will never show this collage. This is made to be reproduced… pure information that has an unlimited edition. The object has no inherent value.”
The past continues
The artworks are aligned with post-conceptual concerns like distribution, circulation and the status of the image, while also responding to the culture industry of the 1980s. Pieces like ‘Passeisme’ and ‘The 8-Hour Day’ are inspired by downtown New York, especially band posters and street advertising, turning graphic formats into analytical tools. The work ‘Entertainment Erases History’ further underscores this position by substituting canonical art images with household media devices, anticipating a culture increasingly shaped by recording technologies and screen-based consumption. Viewed today, the work reads less as speculation and more as a pragmatic prophecy.
In 1984, Nagy lost his father and grandmother to cancer. This led him to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and his work ‘Simulations’, which proposed the idea of global capitalism replicating similar to the disease itself. Nagy conceptualised what he calls the “Cancer Logos” during this period. These works fuse multiple representational images into dense abstractions. While viewers often infer that the works are microscopic imagery, Nagy clarifies: “I liked that they thought it looked like a cancer cell—but it’s not. Again, it’s all clip art and pictures… fused together.”
A new direction
Nagy’s travels across Europe in the mid-1980s led to another formal investigation: architecture as proliferating ornament. Heavily influenced by Adolf Loos’ critique of decoration, he describes Baroque and Rococo structures as “architecture gone cancerous, that the form overtakes.” Works such ‘L’Age d’Or’ and ‘God Lie’ are assembled from multiple photographic sources, producing hyper-constructed spaces that exceed their referents. Here, collage operates less as juxtaposition and more as synthesis.
Later works introduce autobiographical elements without abandoning systemic construction. ‘A Million Dreams’ overlays maps of Egypt, Paris and Lucca—sites that shaped the artist’s intellectual formation. “It’s really, really very autobiographical—it’s a story of my life,” Nagy explains, emphasising that the images of the Nile River, or pieces of Islamic architecture, are not arbitrarily placed but are selected for symbolic coherence.
The exhibition concludes with ‘Self-Portrait at Persepolis’— the title does not necessarily correspond to lived experiences— it is part of a series of works depicting solitary male figures within architectural environments. “I haven’t been to Persepolis… or many of these places,” Nagy says, positioning the self-portrait as a conceptual placeholder rather than a literal record. The figure becomes a device through which scale, history and authorship are negotiated.
If the exhibition’s title operates rhetorically, the works themselves argue against any singular claim to invention. Instead, they point to a transnational network of images, theories and histories—suggesting that artistic production, much like culture itself, is cumulative rather than proprietary.
(The exhibition is on display till February 14 at Nature Morte, Vasant Vihar)