Janice Nowinski "Recent Paintings"

Bowery Gallery

poster for Janice Nowinski "Recent Paintings"

This event has ended.

Janice Nowinski has never shied from confronting the past—her investigations have ranged from Old Master works to the tradition of painting the still life—but in her newest body of work she risks a more personal and somewhat confessional approach. A collection of snapshots from a summer idyll with a complicated friend instigates many of the works in the show. Shrouded, distant and ambivalent in meaning, the paintings bring a past event to the present for a closer and more reasoned examination. The paint handling is brusque and urgent. The subject is treated without nostalgia. The paintings refuse to be springboards into reminiscent longing and memorializing. In holding their ground, they transmit through paint all of the situation's ambiguity resolutely and in the present tense.

These personal images of a male body are juxtaposed with another series inspired by erotic picture postcards of ladies from the late 19th century. Nowinski's naked women are as provocative and confounding as any models who posed for Courbet or Manet. Stripped down and anonymous, Reclining Nude, 2012, carries on the tradition of painting the female body minus the veneer of the male painter's gaze. The paintings in this exhibition explore issues of the public and the private, the hidden and the exposed. They are personal, saucy and opaquely narrative.

Media

Schedule

from May 22, 2012 to June 16, 2012

Opening Reception on 2012-05-24 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Janice Nowinski

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