Peter Nagy, Artist and Gallerist Behind Nature Morte, Has Died

Peter Nagy, the artist and dealer whose gallery Nature Morte became a prominent platform for contemporary art in South Asia, died on 13 October, aged sixty-seven, after a long illness. The gallery announced his death in a statement posted to social media, remembering him as ‘fearlessly, irreverently and wildly free’.

Nagy graduated from Parsons School of Design in 1981 with a BFA, having studied communication design and art history. The following year, aged twenty-three, he opened Nature Morte with the artist Alan Belcher in a storefront on East 10th Street. It was part of a generation of artist-run spaces offering a more informal alternative to SoHo’s established galleries. Over six years, Nature Morte became closely identified with work that folded Conceptual art into Pop art, using appropriation and reproduction to question art’s status as a commodity. It closed in 1988.

Nagy’s own practice ran alongside the gallery. His Xerox works of 1982–85 and the International Survey Condominiums series combined photocopy technology with art-historical critique. The series used photocopies to bring art-historical timelines together with museum floor plans, making the ways art is organised and presented part of its subject. His work is held by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MOCA, Los Angeles.

He moved to New Delhi in 1992 and spent five years between India and New York before reopening Nature Morte in India in 1997. The gallery helped bring conceptual, lens-based and installation practices into greater visibility in a market then largely oriented towards painting. It built long associations with Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Mrinalini Mukherjee and Raqs Media Collective, among others. Aparajita Jain joined as partner and director in 2013. Two further Delhi spaces followed in 2021, and a Mumbai branch in 2024.

In August, the gallery opened a permanent home in Gulmohar Park, New Delhi, with The Evolution of the Soothsayer, a two-part survey of 35 artists curated by Nagy to mark three decades of the gallery’s Indian operation. Its second chapter opens later this month. Earlier this year, Nature Morte staged America Invented Everything, a presentation of new silkscreens reproducing works Nagy made between 1983 and 1991.

The gallery said its spaces in New Delhi and Mumbai would remain open in accordance with Nagy’s wishes. “To him, an exhibition was never about the gallery. It belonged to the artist who had poured themselves into it and to everyone who came to see it. He believed an artist’s moment should never be put on hold,” the gallery said.

The Evolution of the Soothsayer Part 2, Nature Morte, Gulmohar Park, New Delhi, 22 October–12 December