ART CITIES: N.York-Thomas Nozkowski

Arriving in New York after the first wave of Abstract Expressionism and during the rise of Pop Art and Minimalism, Thomas Nozkowski defied the dismissal of painting at the time, embracing the medium and dedicating himself to an inventive and focused body of work attuned to his subjective experience of the world.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

Thomas Nozkowski’s prolific oeuvre reveals an ability to shift between various media, ranging from ballpoint pen and pencil to gouache and oils. Eschewing large-scale formats and resistant to established styles or recurrent motifs, Nozkowski developed a varied and influential artistic practice. Focusing on the artist’s practice during the 1970s and 1980s, this presentation, titled “Thomas Nozkowski: Everything in the World” includes the artist’s signature, intimately scaled 16” x 20” canvas compositions alongside several large-scale paintings that have not been publicly exhibited in decades and three painted wood sculptures. The show will be accompanied by a new catalogue produced by Pace Publishing, featuring a new essay by Martin Clark, director of the Camden Art Centre in London. The exhibition of his work centers on a hugely formative period of the artist’s career during which he set out specific aesthetic terms for his practice. The exhibition’s title, “Everything in the World”, brings the relationship between Nozkowski’s abstractions and his daily observations to the fore. Anything and everything in his environment—an object, a surface, a quality of light—could capture his curiosity and attention, becoming the source material for a painting. Breaking away from the aesthetics of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, the artist embarked on an intensely experimental journey, raising formal and conceptual questions about the expressive potential of abstraction that he would continue revisiting in the decades to come—and that would define his approach for the rest of his life. The 1970s and 1980s also saw major changes in Nozkowski’s personal life, including the birth of his son and the purchase of his first property in New York’s Hudson Valley—a place that would become an enduring inspiration for his work. The artist made fewer than ten large-scale canvases in his life, and four of these rare works will be exhibited with more than 20 of his classic, small-scale paintings in Pace’s forthcoming show in New York. Three of Nozkowski’s idiosyncratic, conical, painted wood sculptures from 1979 will also figure in the presentation—these objects reflect his interest in the material presence and physicality of paint in its encounters with different surfaces. Together, these works speak to the exploratory ethos that guided Nozkowski over the course of two decades. Against a backdrop of great social and political change, Nozkowksi found himself seeking a change of his own at the beginning of the 1970s. Breaking free of the aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism and the Bauhaus as well as Pop, Minimalism, and New Figuration, movements that dominated the New York art world at the time—he embarked on an intensely experimental journey into the expressive potential of abstraction. Questions about mark making, color as both form and material, and other formal and conceptual subjects guided Nozkowski’s art during this decade, leading him into new realms of experimentation. He developed a distinctive visual language of forms, symbols, and notations grounded in his own reality while defying obvious legibility, forging constellations of biomorphic and geometric abstractions as part of his lengthy and exacting making process. In this way, the artist transformed his canvases into worlds unto themselves. He made two major decisions at this time that would shape and inform the next 40 years of his work: his paintings would be small-sized and rendered on canvas board, and everything he painted, the artist said, “would come in some way from life.” Anything and everything, from objects and textures to memories, moments, and feelings, could capture his attention and become the basis for a painting. This decade also saw several big changes in his personal life, including the birth of his son, Casimir, in 1976, and his purchase of property in upstate New York—in the town of High Falls, on the Shawangunk Ridge—in 1977. Both Nozkowski and his wife, the artist Joyce Robins, set up studios in their new country house surrounded by the natural wonders of the Hudson Valley. Though he had committed to painting on intimately scaled 16” x 20” canvas boards in the 1970s, Nozkowski experimented briefly with a bigger format in the ‘80s. The artist created fewer than ten large-scale canvases in his life, and these rare works, four of which are presented in the exhibition, speak to the exploratory ethos of his practice in this period of his career. As with his other paintings, Nozkowski used small brushes to add layered details in these more monumental works, which are more than twice as big as his signature 16” x 20” compositions. Nozkowski often spoke of his beloved walks, hikes, and camping trips in the Shawangunk Mountains, near his home upstate. The artist’s relationship with the natural world was always “a fundamental and treasured part of his existence,” as Clark writes in our new publication, but he wasn’t interested in creating one-to-one representations of what he saw. With shape, line, color, and texture as his primary devices, Nozkowski used an entirely abstract language to suggest specific topographies, terrains, trails, bodies of water, and rock formations in his environment. He eschewed idealized forms in favor of evocative motifs, which enabled him to investigate.

Photo: Thomas Nozkowski, Untitled (4-117), 1986, oil on canvas board, 16″ × 20″ (40.6 cm × 50.8 cm) 17″ × 21″ × 1-1/2″ (43.2 cm × 53.3 cm × 3.8 cm), framed, © Estate of Thomas Nozkowski, Courtesy Estate of Thomas Nozkowski and Pace Gallery

Info: Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 8/3-20/4/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/