Nora Turato does not claim any sense of authority over her art. She’ll be the first one to say it. “This is a thing that the art world does—it presents us with the idea that we as artists always know what we’re doing,” the 33-year-old said in an interview on the eve of her new show “it’s not true!!! stop lying!” at Sprüth Magers in L.A. Many young art stars of her generation have been conditioned to adopt an air of authority around what they do, but Turato doesn’t make the mistake. She is intent on feeling her way through her art along with the rest of us. “I’m not in control at all,” she said.
Born in Zagreb in 1991—the same year Croatia declared independence—Turato never set out to be an artist. Music was her first love, and her formal training came in graphic design. Her own sense of what it means to be an artist is evolving in real time—and it’s thrilling to watch. “My art career is also the process of me becoming an artist,” she said. “It wasn’t so much like I was an artist, then I got a career. My career started, but I’m still figuring it out.” The work, she continued, “never ends. It’s a process of me learning my process.”
Nora Turato, this isn’t me / i need some healing (2024). © Nora Turato. Courtesy the artist, LambdaLambdaLambda, Galerie Gregor Staiger and Sprüth Magers. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.
The topic of control came up as the Amsterdam-based artist talked about preparing for the one-woman performance set to inaugurate the Sprüth Magers exhibition this week. As with all of Turato’s live pieces (like those she debuted at Performa last year, at MoMA in 2022, and the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in 2019), the L.A. performance would feature the artist delivering a virtuosic, mile-a-minute monologue synthesized from various snippets of unrelated text and speech collected in recent years.
If you were to transcribe it, much of what Turato says during her performances doesn’t add up. But these are not TED Talks. With all the material she crams in—and the angry, amphetaminic way she delivers it—Turato’s performances amount to something more abstract and expressionistic: a portrait of a person grasping for meaning amid the endless stream of information that washes over our day to day lives. The irony is that the louder she screams, the more she’s drowned out by the din.
Turato’s practice is built around a well-honed habit of cataloging seemingly banal or random snippets of language she stumbles on, often via wildly different sources. It’s not Pulitzer-worthy sentences she’s after, but the opposite: internet idioms, ad slogans, text slang, YouTube comments. Her interest in collecting quotes and phrases like these recalls the way Yuji Agematsu collects street debris: she’s after the stuff everyone else ignores, and she doesn’t need to look hard; more often than not, it’s already in front of her.
Every year or two, when the libraries of language collected by Turato reach a kind of critical mass, she collates them into a series of books she calls “Pools.” It’s from the ongoing series’ latest example, “Pool 6,” that Turato drew the material for both this week’s performance and the enamel panels and site-specific paintings that fill out the Sprüth Magers show.
The latter artworks play particularly well in LA, with language culled from movies and the spaces of health and wellness. The second line in the steel-paneled piece i’m going clear / total organization is necessary! (2024) was taken from Taxi Driver (1976), for instance. The main message of i know we are all into woo here, but homeopathy is fake, right? Right! (2024) sounds like gossip you could overhear from Erewhon shoppers right now.
Nora Turato, i know we are all into woo here, but homeopathy is fake, right? right! (2024). © Nora Turato. Courtesy the artist, LambdaLambdaLambda, Galerie Gregor Staiger and Sprüth Magers. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.
It would be incorrect to say that Turato’s art is about technology, but the sense of information-overload that animates it is as much a technological phenomena as it is a social or cultural one. IPhones, social media platforms, AI apps—it’s through these pieces of technology that Turato often discovers her language, and the specter of corporate capitalism looms over her work. Sometimes it’s even the subject.
It’s because of this that Turato emphasizes an analog, human approach in much of what she does. Her signs and site-specific murals evoke the tics of industrialized design unpacked by artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, but they’re all laboriously painted by hand. “I call it the ‘homeopathic imprint of attention,’” she explained. “If somebody is putting love and attention into the line—you might not be able to see it, but there’s something about the care that sticks. It’s perceived on an unconscious level.”
Nora Turato, sleep / it’s good for you! (2024). © Nora Turato. Courtesy the artist, LambdaLambdaLambda, Galerie Gregor Staiger and Sprüth Magers. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.
As with Kruger and Holzer, it’s not hard to point to historical touchpoints in Turato’s practice. (Lawrence Weiner, Kay Rosen, Joan Jonas are other names that may come to mind.) But the most exciting aspect of Turato’s work is the same one that distinguishes her from predecessors: hers is an art of the right now. “That’s pretty much what it’s about. It’s about a certain type of attention, a certain way of dealing with information, that’s really new I think.”