Nicole Wittenberg @ Acquavella Galleries, NYC - 'All the Way' Exhibition + Book

Nicole Wittenberg: All the Way

Acquavella Galleries, New York

October 16 - December 5, 2025

“I think good paintings are moving images, because they’re not static. Great paintings move.”

—Nicole Wittenberg

Acquavella Galleries presents All the Way, Nicole Wittenberg’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and her first at Acquavella’s New York location. Wittenberg’s return to Acquavella follows the artist’s three solo museum exhibitions over this summer: Maison La Roche, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris; the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, Maine; and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine. Several works from Wittenberg’s museum exhibitions in Rockland and Ogunquit  appears in All the Way.

All the Way explores painting’s ability to capture the sensation of a singular moment extended over time. Nicole Wittenberg's painting practice takes scenes, elements, and encounters with the natural world as its subject matter. Her landscapes and twisting florals explore the medium’s ability to capture temporal moments as impressions that retain the energy of the experience.

The paintings in this exhibition give the viewer the somatic sensation of immersion—to be in a world within the painting. In this respect, Nicole Wittenberg draws on the work of Paul Cézanne and the Post-Impressionists, as well as the Fauvist challenge to traditional color. For Wittenberg “white is not as bright as yellow or certain shades of orange or even certain shades of green or pink. They’re brighter than white. I wanted light that was just as intense as daylight to replicate the sensation of actual light and actually being there.”

Wittenberg’s process often begins with pastel drawings, small oil paintings and ink studies, which display an economy of gesture and an expert handling of the relationship between light and color. Both her drawings and her paintings show a resistance to perspective and a tension with figuration.

Art historian Suzanne Hudson connects Wittenberg's approach to the work of Venetian colorists, such as Veronese: “Sometimes the grounds are exposed more fully, and at others, outline other forms in residual slivers of crackling intensity, further elaborating color ranges and relations.”

Artist Nicole Wittenberg (b. 1979)

Nicole Wittenberg is an artist, curator, professor, and writer who was born in San Francisco and is currently based in New York City. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003.

In 2012, Wittenberg received the coveted John Koch Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters to a young artist making figurative work. From 2011 to 2014, she served as a teacher at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and in 2017, she was a professor in the Critical Theory department at the School of Visual Arts.

Wittenberg’s works are included in prominent collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Albertina, Vienna; the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut.

Nicole Wittenberg

Texts by Suzanne Hudson, David Salle, Devon Zimmerman, 

and an interview by Jarrett Earnest

Published by Monacelli, 2025

256 pages, 250 illustrations

Hardback, 29 cm x 25 cm

ISBN: 9781580936811

Photo courtesy of Phaidon

www.phaidon.com

The artist’s first comprehensive monograph was published this summer by Monacelli Press, coinciding with her recent solo exhibitions in Maine and France.

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, NEW YORK

18 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075 

www.acquavellagalleries.com

Shifting Horizons @ Peter Blum Gallery, NYC - An exhibition of paintings featuring landscapes by Nancy Diamond, Alex Katz, Eleanor Ray, Nicole Wittenberg, Robert Zandvliet

Shifting Horizons

Nancy Diamond, Alex Katz, Eleanor Ray, Nicole Wittenberg, Robert Zandvliet

Peter Blum Gallery, New York

June 5 – July 25, 2025

Peter Blum Gallery presents Shifting Horizons, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper featuring landscapes by Nancy Diamond, Alex Katz, Eleanor Ray, Nicole Wittenberg, and Robert Zandvliet. 

Shifting Horizons assembles five contemporary artists whose intimately scaled landscapes reflect a shared sensitivity to the nuances of place, perception, and memory. Working at a modest size in these works, Diamond, Katz, Ray, Wittenberg, and Zandvliet approach the natural world not as a fixed subject but as a space for exploration—where observation and emotion converge. These works transcend straightforward representation, instead offering distilled moments that evoke atmosphere, light, and spatial rhythm. Whether rooted in direct experience or shaped by recollection, the landscapes presented here invite a slower way of seeing.

Nancy Diamond’s recent works on paper explore the interplay between natural observation and imaginative transformation. Utilizing watercolor and gouache, she creates layered compositions of clouded skies, often inspired by her time in the Catskills. These images shift between the recognizable and the abstract, reflecting a space between recording and reimagining. Her attention to form and subtle variation invites viewers into a quiet terrain that considers both detail and broader view, where the natural world is shaped by personal perspective. Within this space, a subtle bodily presence emerges, connecting internal and external, inviting contemplation on how perception and memory mediate experience. Diamond’s palette suggests changing weather, fading light, and quiet transitions—moments that feel both observed and remembered. Diamond received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and she received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation. Select recent exhibitions include FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2024); Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY (2024); and KARMA, Thomaston, ME (2024).

Alex Katz’s small-scale landscape paintings on board reveal a more immediate and spontaneous side of his iconic practice of larger scale flattened forms. Often painted en plein air or quickly from memory, they emphasize light, seasonal shifts, and spatial rhythm. The landscapes on board are concise yet expansive, balancing on the cusp of abstraction and representation. In these works, Katz revisits familiar locations—Maine woods, waterlines, and fields—with a sense of closeness, reinforcing his enduring fascination with perception, time, and the American landscape. Katz studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Cooper Union, and he received the National Medal of Arts and Lifetime Achievement Award, National Academy Museum. Select recent solo exhibitions include The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2024); The Albertina, Vienna, Austria (2023); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2022-23).

Eleanor Ray’s intimately scaled landscape paintings distill complex spatial and emotional experiences into panels, often no larger than a notebook page. Working primarily in oil on panel, she captures the essence of places—ranging from the American West to the Caribbean—through a synthesis of memory, observation, and abstraction. Her compositions are informed by drawings, photographs, and recollections, allowing her to reconstruct scenes with a focus on light, atmosphere, and architectural framing. This approach results in works that are both specific and universal, inviting viewers into a contemplative space that transcends the depicted locale. Ray’s restrained palette and subtle brushwork evoke a sense of quietude and introspection, demonstrating how modestly scaled works can convey resonance. Ray received an MFA from the New York Studio School and received awards from The Edward F. Albee Foundation and NYFA Fellowship in Painting. Select recent exhibitions include Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY (2024); Venus Over Manhattan, New York, NY (2022); and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022).

Nicole Wittenberg’s works are expressively rich. Beyond rendering naturalistic topography or scenery, living entities emerge in her images as through sensation or perception: a torrent of water, the twist of a leaf, the glare of afternoon light on the bark of a tree, all suggestive of fleeting moments and a subjective view. In a textural play of color and movement, they convey her affective relationship to the natural world, as well as nature’s evanescent traits. While Wittenberg captures the physical reality of Maine’s coastal forests, wetlands, and meadows, she more closely works with light, with the transit of the sun through the sky, as well as her own positioning within the dense and verdant landscape. Wittenberg received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ John Koch Award. Select recent solo exhibitions include Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME (2025); Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME (2025); and Maison la Roche, Paris, France (2025).

Robert Zandvliet’s works on paper—each horizontal and measuring 9 x 12 inches—demonstrate an intuitive and meditative engagement with landscape and mark-making. Using egg tempera, oil, or a combination, Zandvliet treats each paper surface as a space for distilled experimentation, balancing gesture, color, and form. They operate like visual thoughts: rhythmic, atmospheric, and charged with a sense of immediacy. Despite their uniform size, the works vary in tone, yet all reflect his ongoing investigation into the essence of painting itself. Zandvliet’s process reveals a careful calibration between control and spontaneity, echoing the structure of historical Dutch landscape painting while pushing toward abstraction. Robert Zandvliet received an MFA from De Ateliers, Amsterdam, Netherlands and received a Prix de Rome and the Wolvekamp Prize. Select recent exhibitions include Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands (2022); Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Solothurn, Switzerland (2022); and Dordrechts Museum, Dordrechts, Netherlands (2020, 2019).

PETER BLUM GALLERY

176 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013

www.peterblumgallery.com