NYAB Event - Thomas Nozkowski Exhibition

Thomas Nozkowski Exhibition

The Pace Gallery (508 W 25th St)

This event has ended.

Pace presents an exhibition of recent paintings by Thomas Nozkowski. This is the artist’s third exhibition at Pace.

A catalogue with an essay by Jennifer R. Gross, the Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery, will accompany the exhibition.

The exhibition features twenty-one oil paintings from between 2010 and 2012. For over four decades, Nozkowski has produced richly colored, intimately-scaled 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, Nozkowski creates a seemingly limitless array of works that are simultaneously abstract and pictorial, derived from daily visual experience yet indecipherable. Though the works vary greatly, they share a continual exploration of the relationship between figure and ground, complex and often pattern-like shapes and grids, and colors that run the gamut of spectrum and intensity.

This exhibition includes two relatively large-scale paintings, each measuring 30 by 40 inches. While still painted with small brushes on an easel-size panel, the expanded ground is nearly twice as large as Nozkowski’s typical 22-by-28 inch surfaces. The larger works are part of a series that Nozkowski began fifteen years ago, and which had been dormant until he revisited it last year. Though the larger paintings are still completely abstract, their titles reveal specific subjects—landscapes of the Hudson Valley, where Nozkowksi lives and works.

Through subtle adjustments and juxtapositions of hue, scale, and pattern, Nozkowski creates disorienting and engaging relationships that enliven the entire picture plane. The painting’s surface is often uneven, with some areas matte and others glossy or textured with crosshatching and stippling. Nozkowski will often rework a canvas for years at a time, wiping down, scraping, and repainting.

As Gross writes, “Nozkowski’s paintings are laden with visual trip wires. The compositions are inventive in a non-demonstrative way, in their disorienting shifts in scale and perspective, and startling in their composite color. His deployment of diverse palettes within a single work challenges the authority of the orderly logic of the classical color wheel. His uncanny juxtaposition of pastels with electric contrasting colors, or primary colors against earthen tones, confirms Nozkowski’s intuitive knowledge of color and his willingness to try anything.”

Thomas Nozkowski (b. 1944, Teaneck, New Jersey) received a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union Art School in New York City in 1967. He began exhibiting in group shows in 1973, and made his solo debut in 1979. Since then, Nozkowski’s paintings have been in over 300 museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide, including 75 solo shows. In 2009 the National Gallery of Canada presented the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date, and in 2008 the Fisher Landau Center for Art in Long Island City, New York, presented Thomas Nozkowski: Paintings. In 2007, ten works were featured in the Venice Biennale.

Nozkowski’s work is part of numerous public collections worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Dallas Museum of Art; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; FRAC (Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain), Orleans, France; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland; The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, Canada; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The New York Public Library, New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, among others. In 2010, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Thomas Nozkowski lives and works in High Falls, New York. He has been represented by Pace since 2007.