Chicago artist Nate Otto is primarily known for his dense and illustrative cityscapes on panels. Inspired and influenced by art brut, abstract expressionism, graphic design, comic art, geometric abstraction, and the onslaught of imagery that is the modern world, Nate has had solo shows in Chicago at Vertical Gallery, Adventureland Gallery, and Firecat Gallery, has worked with Basecamp, Soho House, and Pivotal Labs, and has participated in group shows in New York, Los Angeles, Madrid, and elsewhere.
Nate says, “The buildings in my work are inspired by the buildings in Chicago but not directly reflective of them. I’m thinking about cities; their density, the neighborhoods, the inhabitants of the buildings, and the nature of city blocks, while I’m working on the images, but they are not based on any specific places. In some pieces the buildings are reduced to shapes and they encroach from all directions in geometrical patterns, as the city can sometimes be omnipresent, and surround you at every turn. My wife and I have travelled to many cities in the past few years; New York, Berlin, Paris, Istanbul. Athens, Los Angeles, New Orleans, San Francisco, and I absorb the nature of those cities and aspects of all of them, and those elements find their way into the art, but the places are imagined.”
