“Open your mind to what I shall disclose, and hold it fast within you; he who hears, but does not hold what he has heard, learns nothing.”
―Dante Alighieri, Paradiso

Lehmann Maupin presents A Comedy for Mortals: Paradiso, Tammy Nguyen’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in New York, on view from June 5–August 15, 2025. Across a series of new paintings and works on parchment, Paradiso marks the culmination of a three-part exhibition series based on the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri’s canonical masterpiece of Western Literature. Previously, A Comedy for Mortals: Inferno opened in Seoul in March 2023, and A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio opened in London in 2024. Paradiso comes on the heels of solo exhibitions at the ICA Boston, Massachusetts, in 2023, and the Sarasota Art Museum in Florida in 2024. 

Nguyen’s multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections between geopolitics, ecology, and history, using her unique visual language to intertwine disparate subjects and explore the moral gray areas that permeate global history. Across Nguyen’s work, the tension between her elegant forms and harmonious aesthetics often belies the nature of her non-linear storytelling. Nguyen’s research-based process involves a close reading of foundational texts across the Western canon. Formally, she works across mediums including printmaking, ink drawing, and painting to examine the contrast between text and image, creating rich visual metaphors within layers of material. By generating compositional push and pull between the visible and invisible, she invites the viewer to question preconceived notions of history. Often ripe with inversion, Nguyen’s work presents fluid, spiritual worlds. In her version of The Divine Comedy, Dante’s three epics act as a metaphor for geopolitics during the Cold War. In Inferno, Nguyen tracked Dante and Virgil’s descent into hell against the Space Race, and in Purgatorio, she compares Dante’s ascent of Mount Purgatory to the 1955 Bandung Conference and the Grasberg Mining project. 

In Paradiso, Nguyen ascends into the celestial heavens through a body of new paintings and prints on parchment. Her work chronicles Dante’s journey into the afterlife, where she explores the good and evil territories of beauty, love, and knowledge. Nguyen sets the scene for Dante’s journey against the Cold War-era Space and Arms Race, which, on one hand, accelerated advancements in scientific knowledge and space exploration, and on the other, accentuated the looming threat of natural disaster, war, and the “military-industrial complex.” Always in a state of flux, Nguyen’s new work presents historical and divine subjects in sublime, floating environments, often seen suspended against an ornate backdrop of lush vegetation, abstract forms, and subversive symbols and motifs. 

The paintings in Paradiso are marked by distinct characters and events—from eagles, Frankenstein, Dante, and Eisenhower, to the moon landing, Kennedy’s notes from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address. Using images and texts sourced from public archives, the characters in Nguyen’s version of paradise represent either divine insight or cautious warning. The latter is especially apparent in Nguyen’s paintings that feature Frankenstein, who appears in scenes of natural disaster, punctuated by rhythmic stamps of Eisenhower’s portrait. Standing on Mount Tambora—the volcano whose 1815 eruption sparked the global climate crisis that inspired Mary Shelley’s novel—Frankenstein alludes to atomic technology and the ongoing threat of destruction. In several works on view, an eagle motif represents justice; these birds are seen soaring diagonally across lavish, sunset-toned atmospheres.  Furthermore, the exploration of imperial structure is foundational to the exhibition, using Dante’s Paradiso as a key text to unpack symbols and themes central to its ideologies. This is especially apparent in the exhibition’s central work, Love Justice, You Rulers of the Earth (2025), where this titular phrase is spelled out by a giant eagle emerging from the center of the multi-paneled, cathedral-like composition.

A Comedy For Mortals: Paradiso also includes new prints on parchment, depicting characters encountered on Dante’s spiritual journey. Here, he meets Beatrice, the love of his life, who replaces Virgil as his guide. In Nguyen’s new etchings, she uses compounding printmaking techniques, including intaglio and screen printing, layering upon copper plates previously used in Inferno and Purgatorio. These prints reference Dante’s beatific ascent, marking a return to the body as the ultimate vessel of wisdom and knowledge and to nature as the ultimate source of beauty and structure in the celestial realm. 

Concurrent to the exhibition, A Comedy for Mortals: Artists' Books of Tammy Nguyen will be on view June 27–September 26 at The Cooper Union Library in New York. This presentation will showcase a selection of artist books from Nguyen’s Divine Comedy series, including Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Presented together for the first time, these books bring the body of work in this series full circle, offering an exploration of the malleability of language and its power to construct and dissolve worlds.