“This mountain is so formed that it is 
always wearisome when one begins the ascent, 
but becomes easier the higher one climbs.” 
— Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio

Lehmann Maupin presents A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio, Tammy Nguyen’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, which spans two floors of the gallery’s location in Cromwell Place. Featuring new paintings, works on paper, and a sculptural artist book, Purgatorio is the second exhibition in a three-part series based on the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri’s canonical masterpiece of Christian literature. A Comedy for Mortals: Inferno opened in Seoul in March 2023, and the series will culminate in 2025 with A Comedy for Mortals: Paradisio, Nguyen’s first exhibition in New York. Additionally, Purgatorio follows Nguyen’s recent debut solo museum exhibition at the ICA/Boston. 

Nguyen’s multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections between geopolitics, ecology, and history, using narrative to intertwine disparate subjects through artmaking. Across her mediums, Nguyen’s work aims to unsettle, and the tension between her elegant forms and harmonious aesthetics often belies the nature of her storytelling. She probes this contrast between form and content by confusing the visual plane, which she achieves by creating intricate visual metaphors nestled within many layers of diverse material. Nguyen works with watercolor and vinyl paint, repeatedly obscuring and revealing her subjects to build friction.

In Nguyen’s version of The Divine Comedy, Dante’s three epics act as a metaphor for the geopolitics of Southeast Asia during the Cold War. Nguyen constructs narratives that explore the moral gray areas that permeate global history, probing the power language has to shape these ambiguities. Her world building is often ripe with inversion—in Inferno, Nguyen tracked Dante and Virgil’s descent into hell against the Space Race—up is down, day is night, and large is small. In Purgatorio, as Dante seeks to purify his soul by ascending Mount Purgatory with Virgil as his guide, Nguyen plots a simultaneous descent into her version of the Grasberg Mine (a project conducted in West Irian, Indonesia from the 1930s–80s).

The paintings in Purgatorio are united in formal qualities but marked by distinct characters—from statuesque angels appropriated from Gianlorenzo Bernini sculptures, to prehistoric dinosaurs, to a host of international leaders from the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. Nguyen immerses these characters in a lexicon of imagery that sets the scene for her version of purgatory, which takes the form of an island that exists in liminal time and space, each occupant a kind of refugee in an eternal state of waiting. In Angels Carrying Crosses on Mount Purgatory (2023), angels ascend the canvas, nocturnal luna moths trace the path of the moon, seashells dot the sky like stars, and ancient fern fronds rhythmically punctuate the picture plane. In Natural Love is Always Inerrant (2024), Jesus Christ himself arrives by boat to the shores of purgatory, bearing a crucifix; the composition is divided in two, the figure at center framed by sunset on the left and sunrise on the right.

During the Cold War, Southeast Asian countries were contending with the anxiety of both looming conflict (augmented by the destruction wreaked by the atomic bomb in Japan) and their new sovereignty. Here, ancient monsters reference this kind of existential and ever-present menace. In several paintings, including Love Can Never Turn its Sight (2024) and What Sin is Purged Here in the Circle Where We are Standing? (2024), prehistoric dinosaurs emerge from and retreat into the surrounding fauna. Nguyen’s dinosaurs allude to one monster in particular—Godzilla, whose depiction first developed in 1950s Japan. In this way, the dinosaurs in Purgatorio reference the continued threat of atomic warfare and serve as a vehicle for the address of traumas past. Other works, such as I Pray to God That This Asian-African Conference Succeeds (2024) and World Peace is Not Merely the Absence of War (2024), depict individuals who were present at the Bandung Conference, where African and Asian leaders gathered to imagine a future independent from Western influence and control. These figures permeate the environment of purgatory, gesturing towards the endurance of ideas and resistance.

A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio culminates in a large-scale artist book entitled Mine, Purgatory (2024), which itself takes the form of a mountain and opens inwards like a mine. With each turn of the page, the reader descends into the mountain, growing closer to the center. The pages themselves contain excerpts from both the Bandung Conference and Dante’s cantos in Purgatorio; Nguyen manipulates the stanzas to create her own idiosyncratic translation, which becomes increasingly complete as one reaches the end of the book. As the cantos conclude with Dante’s discovery of his true love, Nguyen’s reader approaches the center of the mine, and treasure is unveiled: at the base of the book is the golden imprint of a dinosaur foot. Through an investigation of the materiality of language, Nguyen’s artist book in A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio offers a paradigm for the formation of both identity and history, and in their intersection, probes the good, the bad, and the morally ambiguous.

SOS- These Are Gold- Containing Copper Ore, Work on Paper, 2024