Nick Turner is an American multidisciplinary artist born in Boston and raised in the rural landscapes of Maine. His practice spans painting, photography, and collage, exploring the relationship between landscape and the human condition. Drawing from a lifelong engagement with horses, the American West, the ocean, and the natural world, Turner’s work considers memory, scale, belonging, and humanity’s place within the landscape.
Turner’s education was shaped by lived experience from an early age. Homeschooled until fourteen, he later moved to the South of France, where he attended a French lycée before completing the International Baccalaureate in Toulouse. He subsequently studied at Parsons School of Design in New York, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Illustration. This combination of self-directed learning, movement between cultures, and direct engagement with the environments around him continues to inform his approach to making art.
Working between Europe and the American West, Turner spends time on the Atlantic coast of Portugal and across the west between Wyoming, Montana, and Utah. Over the past decade, these experiences have informed an evolving body of work centered on horses, Western landscapes, and the culture and mythology of the American West, while maintaining a parallel and deeply connected engagement with the ocean, surf, and nature.
Turner’s expansive, often solitary landscapes are interwoven with motifs drawn from personal and familial histories. His images move between observation and recollection, intimacy and monumentality, creating visual narratives in which physical terrain becomes a psychological space. Rather than treating landscape as mere setting, Turner approaches it as a repository of memory and experience—a place through which questions of identity, mortality, freedom, and humanity’s enduring relationship with nature can be explored.
In 2023, Yves Saint Laurent published State of Nature, a monograph surveying selected works from across Turner’s career. The publication traces the development of a practice grounded in the American West, horses, the ocean, and the continuing dialogue between landscape, memory, and the human condition.
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