NYAB Event - Thomas Nozkowski "Recent Work"

Thomas Nozkowski "Recent Work"

The Pace Gallery (510 W 25th St)

This event has ended.

"Thomas Nozkowski: Recent Work" features twenty oil-on-panel paintings made over the past two years, each presented alongside a smaller drawing variation. In the works on paper Nozkowski ruminates on alternative directions that he could have taken with each painting, resulting in a dialogue that provides insight into the artist’s process. For over thirty years, Nozkowski has produced richly colored, small-scale abstract paintings, yet his extensive vocabulary of organic and geometric forms means that rarely are any two of his pictures alike. Instead, within the self-imposed restrictions of his working method—abstract oils painted with a small-sized brush on easel-sized canvas board or panel—Nozkowski creates a seemingly limitless variety of works that are simultaneously abstract and pictorial, rooted in daily visual experience yet indecipherable.

“Nozkowski is exactly the kind of artist who makes the effortful seem effortless... with him, abstraction becomes an endless adventure in structure, texture, tone and mood,” wrote Marc Mayer, director of the National Gallery of Canada in the catalogue for the museum’s retrospective of the artist’s work last year. Nozkowski relies on subtle fluctuations, alternating translucencies and opacities, tinting and shading to create varied and vibrant paintings. He will often rework a canvas for years at a time, wiping down, scraping, and repainting, which sometimes results in streaked and modulated hues that optically elide forms and bend spaces. Though the works vary greatly, certain hallmarks exist: a continual exploration of the figure/ground relationship, organic and geometric forms made of complex and often pattern-like shapes, and colors that run the gamut of spectrum and intensity.

[Image: Thomas Nozkowski "Untitled (N-26)" (2010) ink and colored pencil on paper 8.5 x 10 in.]

Media

• Painting

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