Departures of note

Peter Nagy was an American artist and gallerist who became a defining figure of the 1980s East Village art scene. After studying communication design at Parsons School of Design, he co-founded Gallery Nature Morte in Manhattan in 1982 with artist Alan Belcher, establishing one of the first artist-run galleries of the era and a key venue for the post-conceptual, neo-geo movement championed by critics Collins and Milazzo. The gallery operated until 1988 and helped launch the careers of artists such as Steven Parrino, Peter Halley and Richard Prince.

As an artist, Nagy became known in the early 1980s for works that combined painting with Xerox photocopy technology, including his International Survey Condominiums series, which merged art-history timelines with museum floor plans. His work entered the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he was honored with a 2020 retrospective at Deitch Projects in New York.

In 1992 Nagy moved to New Delhi, where he revived Gallery Nature Morte in 1997 and became a pivotal figure in the contemporary Indian art world, providing a platform for artists such as Subodh Gupta. The gallery later expanded with additional spaces in Delhi and a branch in Mumbai. Nagy died on October 13, 2026, after a long illness.