THOMAS NOZKOWSKI PRESENTS NEW WORK IN OCTOBER
Exhibition pairs paintings and drawings to illuminate the artist’s process and methods
Gallery exhibition follows major retrospectives of the abstract painter’s career at the
National Gallery of Canada and Fisher Landau Center for Art
NEW YORK, September 30, 2010—Thomas Nozkowski will present new paintings and works on
paper at Pace’s newest gallery, 510 West 25th Street, New York City, from October 22 through
December 4, 2010. The exhibition is his second at The Pace Gallery and the seventy-third solo show
of his career. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition, and a public reception for the artist will be
held on Thursday, October 21 from 6 – 8 p.m.
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.
An interview between Thomas Nozkowski and Garth Lewis, a Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martins
College of Art & Design in London, will be published in the Pace exhibition catalogue. The conversation
explores Nozkowski’s approach to painting, including the sources of his abstractions, his tightly defined
methods and format, and the function of his works on paper.
“The oils on paper are like snapshots of moments in the lives of my paintings,” said Nozkowski. “I was
taught by Abstract Expressionists and my working methods are rooted in that aesthetic moment: I paint
without a formal preconception, put a mark or a shape or a color down, look at it, change it, add another
thing and so on. I don’t tinker and so every time I go back into a painting I’ll do something that opens up
the entire surface. A typical painting might find itself on my easel a few hundred times in its gestation and
you can see that I must lose a lot of stuff—there are paths not taken, good ideas that weren’t relevant to a
particular painting. When I see that I am losing something of value, something beautiful or curious or
interesting in some way, I’ll take the paint that’s on my palette and go and work on the paper and try to
capture the element that’s disappearing and follow the logic of this new image wherever it wants to take
me.”
In addition to the upcoming exhibition at The Pace Gallery, Nozkowski will be the subject of an exhibition
at the Arts Club of Chicago in 2012. In 2010, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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
Nozkowski’s paintings have been in over 300 museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide, including 73 solo
shows. In 2009 the National Gallery of Canada presented the largest exhibition of Nozkowski’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 Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind –
Art in the Present Tense, Robert Storr’s exhibition at the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Earlier
that summer, Thomas Nozkowski: Subject to Change opened at the Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany.
The artist’s work is part of numerous public collections worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum;
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The 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, among others.
Thomas Nozkowski lives and works in New York City and High Falls, New York.
For more information about Thomas Nozkowski: Recent Work, please contact the Public Relations
department of The Pace Gallery at 212.421.8987. For general inquiries, please email
info2@thepacegallery.com; for reproduction requests, email reprorequest@thepacegallery.com.