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
