Gallery exhibition of new work coincides with artist’s survey currently on view at the Fisher Landau Center, Long Island City, NY; Nozkowski’s work is also featured in the current “Multiplex” exhibition at MoMA, NY

A year after joining PaceWildenstein, Thomas Nozkowski will have his first solo exhibition of new paintings.

Thomas Nozkowski: Recent Work features approximately 40 paintings made over the past three years. The oil on linen on panel paintings and oil on paper paintings on view in this exhibition measure 22×28” and 22×30” respectively. An essay entitled “The Secular Heretic” by poet and art critic John Yau will be published in the exhibition catalogue. The text provides historical background on Nozkowski’s approach to painting, includes a discussion about the relationship between figure and ground in his work, and concludes with notes about the artist’s recent paintings. “Nozkowski utilizes patterns, broken grids, and all the conventions we associate with traditional painting genres (landscape, portraiture, history paintings, Arcadian pastorals), cartoons (head-like shapes and figural allusions ranging from blobs to beasts), biomorphic shapes, and geometric abstraction (grids and hard-edge shapes that exist between rounded lozenges and puzzle-like sections)–all to arrive at a place where a multifaceted figure and complex ground embrace each other,” writes Yau.

Over thirty years ago, Thomas Nozkowski made a commitment to specific decisions regarding the scale and material of his work. Although he has followed this approach persistently, painting small-scale works on canvasboard or panel for several decades, John Yau contends that Nozkowski is not interested in making “reiterations of past accomplishments. He is determined to remain open and inventive, to understand that each experience, however ordinary and meditated, is unique, and to transform that into an abstract painting.” In an interview earlier this year, Nozkowski remarked about his painting process, “I believe that what I’m doing is actually very close to our normal way of looking at and thinking about the world. We slowly build up a whole web of associations and meanings.”

In addition to the upcoming PaceWildenstein exhibition, the artist is the subject of other exhibitions in New York: Thomas Nozkowski: Paintings, a survey from 1979 through 2003, is currently on view at the Fisher Landau Center through April 14, 2008. “A Conversation with Thomas Nozkowski” is planned for Sunday, April 6th at 2:00 p.m. The informal lecture is free to the public and will be followed by a reception. More information is available at http://www.flcart.org/exhibit.htm.

Two of the artist’s paintings are also prominently on view in Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now, a group installation featuring works from the permanent collection on view in the 2nd floor contemporary galleries of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Nozkowski’s work is part of the thematic investigation of formal and conceptual approaches to abstraction. Multiplex remains on view through July 28, 2008.

This summer, Nozkowski’s work will be on view at the Douglas Hyde Gallery at Trinity College in Dublin (June 6–July 24, 2008), and in 2009, the Museé d’art contemporain de Montréal will present a survey exhibition (April 18–October 11, 2009). 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. In 1982, the Museum of Modern Art, New York acquired a painting out of an early one-person exhibition.

Nozkowski’s paintings have been in over 300 museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide, including 65 solo shows. In June 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.

In 2003, the New York Studio School mounted Thomas Nozkowski: Drawings, a retrospective of works on paper. “Wednesday Pictures”, a series of paintings that Nozkowski created on Wednesdays in his New York studio, was on view at the Williams Center for the Arts, Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, in 2002. In 1997-98, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. opened Thomas Nozkowski: Twenty-Four Paintings, which later traveled to The Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Kansas.

Thomas Nozkowski has participated in group shows at The Phillips Collection (2008), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007-2008 and 1984), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2007), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2005), and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (1997) as well as invitational exhibitions at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (1998, 1999, 2006) and the National Academy of Design, New York (2002, 2006, 2008).

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; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; 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 has received many honors and awards throughout his career. Most recently, the artist