Contemporary Project 16: Tammy Nguyen: "The Horror! The Horror!"
January 17, 2026 - September 6, 2026
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX

Tammy Nguyen (b. 1984. San Francisco) creates research-driven paintings, prints, and artist books that draw their imagery from history, literature, science, myth and the natural world. Defined by vibrant color, gilded surfaces, and dense compositions, Nguyen's works give visual form to stories of power and human achievement. She explores how ambition and belief shape the ways we understand the world and how the pursuit of progress balances precariously between aspiration and instability.

The exhibition's title, "The Horror! The Horror!" invokes the final words of Kurtz, the ivory trader whose descent into obsession and isolation lies at the heart of Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. The haunting phrase captures a moment of profound reckoning, where the drive toward greatness carries humanity beyond the bounds of reason. Figures emerge across Nguyen's richly layered paintings, including Icarus–the mythic icon of ambition--Walter Cronkite, King Lear, Cold War-era scientists, a globe maker, and angelic messengers. Each is situated amid dense vegetation alive with elephants, birds, snakes, and moths. These interwoven narrative threads reveal how the impulse to innovate continually courts both instability and awe. Sunlight, depicted with vivid yellow hues, weaves through Nguyen's maddening thicket of foliage as a metaphor for man's ambition. Motifs of flight recur throughout the exhibition, embodying the enduring human desire to transcend limits, even as that longing carries the risk of self-destruction. The overarching theme of madness emerges in the exhibition as both risk and revelation, serving as a force that propels invention even as it threatens to unmoor it.

The case at the center of the gallery features a drawer and objects from an artist book by Nguyen The book itself is shown in the continuation of the exhibition in the nearby collection galleries, presented alongside works from the Blanton's collection selected by the artist. Nguyen was inspired by one of these objects: Ambroise Vollard's Réincarnations du Père Ubu [The Reincarnations of Father Ubu] (1932), a satirical book illustrated by Georges Rouault that reimagines the late-nineteenth-century caricature of a ludicrous despot named Father Ubu. The chapter "Le Père Ubu à l’Aviation" ["Father Ubu Goes Flying"] serves as a touchstone for Nguyen's creation, in which she takes on Father Ubu's absurd meditation on invention and power, revealing how the desire to push to the edge of what is possible unfolds within the fragile space between reason and madness.

Tammy Nguyen: "The Horror! The Horror!" was organized by the Blanton Museum of Art. Support for this exhibition at the Blanton is provided in part by Ellen Berman.
This exhibition information was sourced from the wall text displayed alongside the exhibition.