Peter Nagy

Peter Nagy was born in 1959 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He studied at the Parsons School of Design in New York, where he took communication design, art history and theory, and graduated in 1981. While a student he made large black and white drawings that he described as influenced by Futurism, and his training in design later shaped the paste up and collage methods of his art.

In 1982 Nagy and the artist Alan Belcher opened Gallery Nature Morte in a small storefront on East 10th Street in Manhattan's East Village. The gallery combined conceptualism and pop art and explored the relationship between art and commodity. Steven Parrino had his first solo show there in 1983, and Gretchen Bender, Cady Noland, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Robert Gober and Richard Pettibone also showed there before it closed in 1988. In his own work Nagy mixed painting with Xerox photocopy technology, collaging corporate logos, art history images and museum floor plans, as in the series International Survey Condominiums. He showed at the 1985 Whitney Biennial and at Documenta 8 in 1987 through the collective Group Material, and exhibited with International with Monument, Jay Gorney and Nicole Klagsbrun. In 1992 he moved to New Delhi, and in 1997 he reopened Nature Morte there, first as pop up exhibitions at the India Habitat Centre and from 2003 in a permanent space in Neeti Bagh. The gallery grew to represent leading Indian artists such as Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Jitish Kallat and the Raqs Media Collective, and over the years operated spaces in Mumbai, and earlier in Berlin and Calcutta.

Nagy made India his home from 1992, spending his first years there moving between New Delhi and New York and living simply by selling his own paintings. He was known for an irreverent, independent spirit and for his loyalty to the artists he championed. From 2013 he worked alongside co-director Aparajita Jain, with whom he expanded the gallery's reach.

Nagy died on 13 October 2026, at the age of 67, following a long illness. Nature Morte announced his death in a statement, saying that for more than four decades he had championed artists with a rare combination of rigour, instinct and loyalty. In keeping with his wishes, the gallery did not close in mourning.

Nagy is remembered as a rare figure who bridged the East Village scene of the 1980s and the rise of Indian contemporary art on the international stage. His work is held by the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. A 2014 book by Richard Milazzo surveyed his art, and a 2020 exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch renewed attention to his early work, which critics found prescient about media, corporate power and the culture of the copy. Tributes came from the historian and curator Ranjit Hoskote and the artist Atul Dodiya, among many others.