Nick Cortese was born in California in 1984, and now lives and works in New York City. "I think that the most contemporary references I had when I went to college in New York were Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol. I tried to be interdisciplinary: I took sculpture classes and video classes and painting classes and printmaking classes, but even after all the Marxist, structuralist, post-structuralist, and post-modern rhetoric I could stomach, I still ended up making paintings and drawings. One obvious statement about my drawings is that they are full of recognizable things, and my hope is that the things in different drawings will draw lines association with one another. The drawings all share analogous themes and symbols: dense layering, graveyards, cities, large black voids, caricatures of weepy melancholic faces, and clichés of modernist “abstract” shapes. Although analogy has a tendency to level everything, I do not want to say that I am indifferent to what I put in my drawings. They are about leveling the indifference of stuff, too much stuff to even put in one drawing. "Surface is paramount for me, because I don’t think that a drawing can live anywhere but on the surface of things, (… ) it has the capacity to bring together, in a non-disjunctive way, conceptions of space and surfaces that would be otherwise incompatible.