Link to Post:
http://www.pirihalasz.com/blog.htm?post=904229
Piri Halasz reviews ten current and recent painting exhibitions in New York including: Jim Dine and Thomas Nozkowski at Pace, Going Into the Dark at The Painting Center, Walt Kuhn: American Modern at DC Moore, Marina Adams: Coming Through Strange at Hionas Gallery, Walter Robinson: Indulgences, Recent Paintings & Works on Paper at Dorian Gray (through March 31), Franz Kline: Coal and Steel at Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, Christine Hughes and Francine Kornfeld at Art 101, Jean-Michel Basquiat at Gagosian (through April 6), and Thornton Willis: Steps at Elizabeth Harris (through April 13).
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2013/02/the-man-podcast-thomas-nozkowski/
On the occasion of the upcoming exhibition Thomas Nozkowski: Recent Work at Pace Gallery, New York (on view from February 22 through March 23), Tyler Green talks to painter Thomas Nozkowski about his work.
Nozkowski comments: "I do have a kind of reality core to my work, a kind of kernel of something in the world behind everything I do. I try to come up with more improbable things to paint. What can't you paint; what shouldn't you paint; what would be really stupid to paint? What kind of devices are bankrupt? What kind of devices are so disgusting nobody would want to look at them? Let's try those things, let's look at them."
He continues: "I need a reason to make a painting. And for me the reason the reason is often that I see something that's confounding. Or I see something that I need to commemorate, or to examine, or to think about. And on walks... I see these things that I really want to persue... before there was a written language there was a visual language and our earliest ancestors would read the world, they would see things in it that meant something to them - a broken leaf, some scat on the ground, the color of the sky and what that meant in terms of weather. I think that that's something we can still channel, it's in our DNA, and I think we can find that. And we can find it in all sorts of places. For me, finding it back in the natual world is important."
Link to Post:
http://mnaves.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/wit-at-the-painting-center-2/
Mario Naves posts his catalogue essay for the exhibition Wit, curated by Joanne Freeman, at The Painting Center, New York through February 23, 2013. The exhibition features works by Marina Adams, Polly Apfelbaum, Joanne Freeman, Joe Fyfe, Barbara Gallucci, Phillis Ideal, Jonathan Lasker, Sarah Lutz, Doreen McCarthy, Mario Naves, Thomas Nozkowski, Paul Pagk, Ruth Root, Fran Shalom, and Stephen Westfall.
Naves writes: "Eschewing the purity that was once abstraction’s sine qua non, the artists featured in Wit opt for an almost promiscuous inclusivity. No inspiration is suspect. High-flown ambitions–sure, we got ‘em; historical cognizance, too. But these artists are also characterized by a willingness to embrace a veritable laundry list of references: nature, narrative, comics, design, technology, science, representation and, not least, humor. Not that humor has been entirely absent from the history of abstract art: Malevich pranked Mona Lisa five years before Duchamp and Mondrian paid winning homage, in oil and canvas, to his beloved boogie-woogie music. Still, abstraction nowadays is more and more a repository of quirks, tics and pictorial double entendres, having as much in common with Buster Keaton, say, as Neo-Plasticism."
Link to Post:
http://www.pirihalasz.com/blog.htm?post=884652
Piri Halasz writes about several current and recent painting exhibitions on view in Manhattan that together provide a sweeping view of abstraction over the last 70 years. The shows include: Conceptual Abstraction at Hunter College's Times Square Gallery, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella at Mitchell-Innes & Nash (through November 24), Hans Hofmann: Works on Paper from the 1940s at the New York Studio School, curated by Karen Wilkin (through January 5), and Ronnie Landfield: Where It All Began at the Kenny Gallery, High School of Art & Design.
Link to Post:
http://www.gorkysgranddaughter.com/2012/06/thomas-nozkowski-june-2012.html
Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy visit the studio of painter Thomas Nozkowski.
As well as sharing a look at his works in progress, Nozkowski shares his thoughts on painting. He remarks: "I… believe that if you can imagine a problem, something to make a painting of, you can also imagine a solution. So whatever the original source is for a painting, I try to stay true to that until the end of the painting. I don't give up in the middle and say 'Gee this would be much better turned upside down' and turn it into some other subject. So the subjects stay there as a touchstone that you can go always back to and reexamine for more information to make the paintings out of."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/51697/a-truly-subversive-artist/
John Yau considers the work of Thomas Nozkowski on the occasion of the exhibition New Editions and Related Drawings at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery, New York, on view through June 16.
Yau writes: "if [Nozkowski] likes a motif in a painting that he's working on, but knows it has to go, he will move it onto a work on paper. One work leads to another, eventually forming a maze of motifs. One could say this maze is a fairly accurate reflection of Nozkowski's view of life. At the heart of Nozkowski's practice is improvisation, a willingness to take something (anything) and do something else to it. He seems to have been one of the few of his generation to understand Jasper Johns's declaration: 'Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it, etc.' "
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2011/07/acquisition-thomas-nozkowski-at-albright-knox/
Tyler Green blogs about Thomas Nozkowski's 2009 painting Untitled (8-117) now on view at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. Green writes that "The 'background' of the painting seems to emit pulses of light, but the yellow bulb in the center-foreground seems to glow steadily... for all that bouncing-light vibration, the surface of the painting is flat and nearly anti-painterly... The effect here is that the canvas didn’t emerge from an artist’s studio, but that it has always existed."
Link to Post:
http://leftbankartblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/thomas-nozkowskis-new-paintings.html
Link to Post:
http://artcritical.com/2010/11/07/thomas-nozkowski/
Link to Post:
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2010/11/thomas-nozkowski-making-pictures-with.html
