David Henry Nobody Jr

David Henry Nobody Jr is the working alter ego of David Henry Brown Jr, a New York artist who came up in the underground performance scene of the 1990s and has described himself as an interventionist and a reality hacker. He skipped graduate school and learned the art world from the inside as an installer, and he traces his own lineage, and the lineage of generative art, back to Fluxus. His first notoriety came in 1999 and 2000, when he spent a year impersonating socialite Alex Vonfurstenberg and talking his way into VIP parties. Around sixty photographs document Alex meeting Bill and Hillary Clinton, Puff Daddy, Oprah Winfrey and Joan Rivers, and the project became his first solo show at Roebling Hall in New York and an international news story. He later coined the term Resemblage, from resemble and collage, for the practice of collaging directly onto a body, almost always his own, using food, pigment, advertising cutouts and household junk. He moved into NFTs in early 2021, showing on Foundation and SuperRare and mounting the inverted room installation Upside Down World in Brooklyn. He has shown with Unit London and been covered by Vice, Hi-Fructose and Musee.

Nobody Jr makes Resemblages: staged photographic and video self portraits in which he buries his own face under food, paint, packaging and consumer debris. The work sits between performance, sculpture and portraiture, and it targets American pop culture, celebrity and political spectacle. Alongside the Resemblages he keeps running long form interventions such as the Alex Vonfurstenberg impersonation and Stalking Trump, and he has recently been making black velvet paintings.

• The Alex Vonfurstenberg impersonation, a year of crashing New York VIP parties in 1999 and 2000
• Resemblage, his term for collaging directly onto the human face and body
• Stalking Trump, a 1999 series of autographed encounters
• Upside Down World, an inverted room installation with performance video NFTs
• Pizza Infinity, a body of felt banner works
• Tracing generative art and his own practice back to Fluxus

On the show