Thomas Nozkowski: Everything in the World
Pace Gallery, New York
March 8 – April 20, 2024
Untitled (6-36), 1987
© Estate of Thomas Nozkowski, courtesy Pace Gallery
Pace presents an exhibition of works by Thomas Nozkowski at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Focusing on the artist’s practice during the 1970s and 1980s, this presentation 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.
Over more than four decades, Thomas Nozkowski developed a singular approach to painting that rejected established aesthetic conventions. The artist, who died in 2019 at age 75, is known for his richly colored and textured abstractions inspired by his memories, everyday experiences, and encounters in the landscapes surrounding his longtime home in upstate New York. In this way, he developed a distinctive visual language of forms, symbols, and notations grounded in his own reality while defying obvious legibility. Constellations of biomorphic and geometric abstractions become worlds unto themselves, which Thomas Nozkowski forged as part of a lengthy and exacting process.
Pace’s 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 show’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 Thomas 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 are exhibited with more than 20 of his classic, small-scale paintings in Pace’s show in New York. Three of Thomas 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 Thomas Nozkowski over the course of two decades.
Arriving in New York after the first wave of Abstract Expressionism and during the rise of Pop Art and Minimalism, Thomas Nozkowski (b. 1944, Teaneck, New Jersey; d. 2019, New York) completed his undergraduate degree in 1967 at Cooper Union. He 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. His 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, Thomas Nozkowski developed a varied and influential artistic practice.
The show is accompanied by a new catalogue produced by Pace Publishing, featuring a new essay by Martin Clark, director of the Camden Art Centre in London.
PACE GALLERY
540 West 25th Street, New York City
