Rock Icon Alison Mosshart’s Freewheeling Art Lands in New York: ‘There Are No Rules’

For the next two weeks, the Nili Lotan menswear store in Lower Manhattan is getting an arty infusion. On its walls, where photographs once hung, are now displayed paintings and collages by Alison Mosshart, artist and frontwoman of rock duo the Kills. Some are small abstract works and photomontages; others are large text-based canvases. The effect, Lotan told me at the opening of the exhibition, is “just really free and bold.”

But even before Mosshart’s art descended on the store, the space already boasted a rock-and-rolling flair. Amid racks of Lotan’s understated men’s fashions sits a large bookshelf stacked with records and books about music, accompanied by two guitars resting on stands—most from the personal collection of the designer’s husband, musician David Broza. That Lotan would find a kindred spirit in Mosshart is unsurprising.

“It’s not so much about the music, but it’s that free spirit on stage, the fearlessness, and the boldness, that I’m drawn to and inspires me,” Lotan said. “With Alison, it was her fearless self-expression in the world—and that laugh—that connected us to each other.”

This show, titled “NO SLOW SONGS,” marks Mosshart’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2018. But it emerges from her ongoing visual art practice, which has run alongside her music career. The sleeves of the Kills’s albums, for one, are as much a part of her and bandmate Jamie Hince’s creative project as their contents. For this latest outing, though, Mosshart had to work with speed; it was pulled together in about three weeks.

“Nili asked me if I wanted to do a show in the store. I was like, absolutely, any excuse to do any show. It’s so fun,” Mosshart told me at the show’s opening. “Then all of a sudden, it was real, and it happened. I had only a couple weeks at home to do it, but I just had so much fun being in my studio again.”

What dominates the space are her wildly colorful abstractions such as The Whole Animal (2025) and Skuxxx Rizzz (2025), mélanges of paint and photo snippets. Her expressive collages lean toward the surreal: both I Am the Way (2025) and Fast Break (2025) juxtapose snapshots of a drummer girl against images of dolls and stuffed animals. Prices for the works range from $1,900 to $5,500.

There’s a spontaneity to all of it. Her Self-Portrait (2025), she said, started as a painting, before she “just kept adding things to it so you just couldn’t tell it’s me at all.”

Same with some of Mosshart’s earlier works, which she recently unearthed from under her bed in Los Angeles. Lined up on one wall of the store, the series from 2008 is all impressionistic marks created on paper with makeup. There are smudges of foundation, smears of mascara, and flashes of nail polish.

“These are all paintings I made in London and the oldest things I probably still have,” she explained. “I made them all with old, expired makeup I was gonna throw away. But then I was like, oh no, these are, like, the most expensive things in the world. So, there’s nine of them. I just love them so much.”

Also included here are watercolors, vivid paintings on Polaroid photographs, and a large acrylic work that greets visitors at the entrance with the painted phrase “EXCEPT WHEN NO ONE IS AROUND.” The range of mediums is remarkable, with Mosshart seemingly working from instinct as much as play.

“It’s just doing whatever that I thought. I’m gonna do photo stuff. I want to cut things out. I want to glue things down. Now I’m just covered in paint. Now I’m gonna do watercolors,” she said. “There are no rules to this.”

But there clearly is a restlessness at the heart of Mosshart’s art practice.

Case in point: her ongoing creative project, CHOP SHOP, now in its eighth year, for which she creates dozens of artworks for sale. Last year saw her produce a multitude of paintings on playing cards (also seen on the cover of the Kills’s double single “LA Hex / New York”); more recently, she offered a host of photo-based works (which is when I nabbed one). With a body of work like the playing cards, she noted, “I can constantly make them.”

Even the life of a touring musician (she’s fresh off the Patti Smith tribute concert at Carnegie Hall) can’t slow her down.

“You’re really, really busy, and then you have this really strange amount of time when you’re trapped with the idea that you can’t leave and you have to wait,” she said of life on the road. “That’s when I make—it makes me not go insane. My hands are never still.”

“NO SLOW SONGS” is on view at Nili Lotan, 183 Duane Street, New York, through April 17.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com