Nina Chanel Abney — Temporary Friends For Sale

Temporary Friends is a suite of five relief prints with collage by Nina Chanel Abney, published in 2019 by Pace Editions Inc., New York, in an edition of 35 plus artist's proofs. Each sheet measures approximately 39 1/4 x 29 1/2 inches and is printed on Hahnemühle Aurora paper; complete sets have historically been presented together in a blue portfolio case.

The suite pairs Abney's relief-printing practice with hand-applied collage elements, layering cut and adhered paper directly into the printed image. This combination extends into an editioned format the cut-and-paste visual logic that runs through much of Abney's painted work, where fragments of figure, text, and pattern are assembled into dense, interlocking compositions.

Abney, born in Harvey, Illinois in 1982, studied at Augustana College before earning her MFA at Parsons School of Design in New York, where she lives and works today. Her practice explores race, gender, and American politics through a visual language of flattened colour and fractured form, and her work has been acquired by institutions including the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Rubell Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Issued as a suite of five related images rather than a single sheet, Temporary Friends asks to be considered as a sequence — each print a variation within a shared visual and thematic framework, exploring connection and impermanence through Abney's distinctive geometric idiom. Guy Hepner represents Abney's print editions produced in collaboration with Pace.