ART-PRESENTATION: Thomas Nozkowski
Thomas Nozkowski is recognized for his richly colored and intimately scaled abstract paintings and drawings that push the limits of visual language. An awareness of perception and the desire to explore the possibilities of seeing, is at once grounded in reality for the artist and released from specific legibility. His concurrent practices of painting and drawing reflect on specific places and experiences—from the deeply symbolic to the notational—translating sensations and memories into abstract compositions.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive
Thomas Nozkowski’s solo exhibition features a selection of never-before-seen paintings on paper by the artist. The richly-colored and intimately-scaled abstract works push the limits of visual language and exemplify Nozkowski’s approach to artmaking, while inviting viewers to explore the possibilities of seeing. Serving to document his paintings in process, these works capture specific moments within the evolution of his paintings. The pieces reflect on specific places and experiences, translating sensations and memories into fully abstract compositions. In the early 1970s, after several years of making large abstract paintings and then more modest Post-Minimal sculpture, Nozkowski found himself put off by the macho scale of both Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, and by what he considered their “imperialist” implications. He decided to work small, and on the easel, initially painting on 16 x 22-inch pieces of art-store canvas board and later on somewhat larger rectangles of linen stretched over wood panels. He wanted, “a size that was scaled to my friends’ apartments, that could hang in a three-room walk-up tenement on Seventh Street”. Nozkowski had studied at the Cooper Union with Abstract Expressionists as well as with refugees from the Bauhaus; he adapted the improvisatory working method of the Abstract Expressionists but used a small brush, scraping down and rubbing off paint in ways that often registered in his finished works. He developed a wide-ranging vocabulary that fused the biomorphic and the geometric into abstract forms noted for their varied colors, their paint handling, and associations ranging from tiled floors or cell clusters to architecture or outer space. He said his untitled abstractions had been distilled from his own experiences of just about anything: memories, relationships, movies, books, other art, and the environment as he encountered it on his daily walks in either upstate New York or New York City, where he and his family lived for years in a nominally refurbished synagogue on the Lower East Side.
Photo: Thomas Nozkowski, Untitled (K – 49), 2009, oil paint on paper , 22″ × 30″ (55.9 cm × 76.2 cm), © Thomas Nozkowski, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery
Info: Pace Gallery, 68 Park Pl, East Hampton, NY, USA, Duration: 1-18/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-17:00, Sun 12:00-17:00, www.pacegallery.com
