Ben Nicholson: Ex Materia Ex Nihilo

Ben Nicholson is showing Ex Materia Ex Nihilo at the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), running from Friday, October 2, 2026, through Sunday, February 14, 2027. It's in the Tube Gallery, at 1125 Cruft St. in Indianapolis.

The exhibition brings together two bodies of Nicholson's work that the public gets to see for the first time. At the center are his wooden Kufic labyrinth cubes—hand-built geometric forms that hold the pages of a single sketchbook he filled over 25 years. Those pages are hand-drawn investigations into the geometry hidden inside Pythagorean mathematics, medieval labyrinths, Islamic calligraphy, the Hebrew alphabet, and Dante's Divine Comedy. The south wall enlarges selected pages for immersive close viewing, while 200 hand-drawn labyrinth variations line the east, west, and north walls, which Nicholson describes as a taxonomy of one of architecture's most ancient and persistent forms.

Nicholson is an architectural designer, artist, and writer who studied at the Architectural Association in London, the Cooper Union in New York, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. He taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology for sixteen years and was a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago until he retired in 2021. The show opens Friday, October 2, at 6 PM and runs through Sunday, February 14, closing at 5 PM.