A flatland of forms: Thomas Nozkowski's abstract paintings have long been characterized by their small scale and use of eccentric shapes against variegated grounds. His work was recently the subject of a trio of shows in the U.S. and Britain
Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Cary Levine
Present in Thomas Nozkowski's paintings is the vernacular of our modern world, streamlined into essential shapes that elicit myriad associations. Through a diligent fine-tuning of form, Nozkowski achieves a delicate equilibrium between recognition and unrecognition, figuration and abstraction. This is the source of the opulent complexity of his work, along with its resistance to critical pigeonholing.
Born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1944, and educated at Cooper Union in New York City, where he has worked since, Nozkowski is in many ways an artist's artist--"quietly influential," as critic Barry Schwabsky recently put it. (1) Trained primarily by Abstract Expressionists--most significantly, Nicholas Marsicano, but also David Lund and Angelo Ippolito--he absorbed their lessons on the virtues of materiality and vigorous paint handling, but quickly abandoned the movement's penchant for grandiosity. Living in New York in the late 1960s, Nozkowski was undoubtedly aware of Minimalism and Pop, but while his subsequent sleek forms and artificial colors can be said to evoke both those movements, his reliance on intuition and earnestly handcrafted, painterly application precludes any attempt to categorically align him with either.
As much as any single factor, it is the consistently small size of Nozkowski's works that places him outside Minimalism and Pop--as well as Abstract Expressionism and its varied progeny. In the world of postwar art, Nozkowski is practically a miniaturist. His paintings are almost all 16 by 20 inches, and 30 by 40 inches is as grand as he gets. The artist views his decision to work small as not just personal, but political. Influenced by the protest movements of the late 1960s and early '70s, this commitment was decidedly anti-institutional. As he recalls:
I was really trying to think something through and politics was informing every thing that we were doing in those days, with Vietnam, with the early days of feminism, and with the Civil Rights movement.... I felt that I could no longer do big paintings that were for an audience of the very institutions that I then despised. The last thing I wanted to do was to paint for a museum, to paint for a bank lobby. I wanted to paint paintings that could lit in my friends' rooms. (2)
His resolve undoubtedly came with a certain amount of risk, as the ubiquity of supersized art meant more modest works tended to be seen as less important. This was only compounded by his frequent use of canvas-board, a medium usually relegated to Sunday painters and high-school art students.
Nozkowski's ability to remain a vital and innovative artist is therefore an achievement in and of itself. Though he graduated from Cooper Union in 1967, and had early contact with some powerful art-world players (he worked for Betty Parsons as an art handler), he did not have his first solo show until 1979.
What is striking is that Nozkowski has taken a format that originated as a bourgeois convention--the domestic-scaled painting--and claimed it as politically subversive. His devotion to smallness also reflects a broader art-historical moment--one in which avant-gardism had become so much the norm that a certain anti-avant-gardism conversely became an effective way to resist conformity. However, the complexity of his paintings belies their moderate sizes; Nozkowski achieves monumentality in minute measurements. His paintings lure the eye to their surfaces and demand prolonged looking. At exhibitions of his work, one notices people spending real time with pictures--tilting their heads, stepping back, forward, moving to the next painting, and quickly returning for another look. It is an intimate, often exhausting, exercise.
A traveling exhibition that opened early this year in Dallas at Southern Methodist University's Pollock Gallery and traveled to the commercial gallery Haunch of Venison in London--his first solo show in Europe--provided an overview of Nozkowski's work, from 1992 to 2003. (Last year the artist also had solo shows at the New York Studio School; Revolution Gallery, Ferndale, Mich.; Max Protetch Gallery, New York; and the Nelson Gallery at the University of California, Davis.) Individually, the 20-odd paintings in the Dallas-London show are universes unto themselves, with their own laws of physics--each an autonomous "Nozkowskiland," as Peter Schjeldahl once called it. (3)
Framing and composition chez Nozkowski are finely calibrated, but appear almost offhand and arbitrary, as though offering a single glimpse of an infinitely larger cosmos. A 1999 canvas in the exhibition, Untitled (7-127), is largely occupied by a bluish-gray painted lattice covered in white wash. The lattice is contained by a thin black border that modulates between elegant arabesques and cartoonish curves--a juxtaposition common in Nozkowski's work. The border is echoed in the conglomeration of baroque forms--resembling decorative architectural details--that violently jut in from the bottom left. The boldness and sharp angularity of these shapes contrast with the subtle effects of the background. Despite the harmonious interplay of these components, the overall image remains irresolvable--both as representation and as pure abstraction--a dissonance that only heightens the painting's appeal.
The distillation of forms into shapes that recall real-world referents but are not truly identifiable--present in this and nearly every work exhibited--is fundamental to Nozkowski's practice. Indeed, the artist insists that all his works are based in observations and memories of everyday life:
You start by doing things on purpose. I am going to make a mark and it's going to stand for my aunt Thelma. That's on purpose. We easily see marks that were made on purpose as opposed to marks that were made accidentally or through some mechanical process; similarly with composition, with color, and with the facture of a painting. (4)
Nozkowski's methodical, but emphatically handmade, approach to mark-making results in works that operate on multiple levels--simultaneously evoking and obscuring reality. Additionally, the artist's refusal to title any of his paintings, using only a number code to designate each, allows them to remain ambiguous, while opening each up to an endless array of individual interpretations.
At the 2003 New York Studio School retrospective of Nozkowski's works on paper (a substantial oeuvre in its own right), this formal methodology could be traced back to his early career, namely to a seminal group of works from the 1970s. Along with a series of ball-point-pen pictograms, the group includes 48 Drawings (1978), a strangely intriguing set of white gouache silhouettes on blue paper. Arranged in sets of 16 in windowpane-like frames, these clean, crisp hieroglyphs look familiar but are never conclusively definable. Approximating a range of icons--spaceship, comma, wishbone, beetle, picket fence--these ensembles are studies in the suggestiveness of simple shapes. These lovingly crafted drawings also mark the beginning of Nozkowski's intuitive, yet meticulously refined, visual language--a language that continues to evolve.
As both the drawing show and the Dallas-London exhibition make clear, Nozkowski's oeuvre has not "developed" in the traditional sense. Instead, particular formal problems have emerged and re-emerged intermittently throughout his career. In the Dallas-London exhibition, chronological history gave way to intimate dialogues between paintings with up to 10 years between them. Though subtle trends could be identified, a comprehensive stylistic time line could not be traced. Indeed, Nozkowski's transformations are never telegraphed; rather, they constitute novel approaches to--and complications of--many of the same fundamental ideas that inspired his earliest drawings.
Untitled (8-27), a 2002 work from the painting show, evokes a mysterious aquatic world that features some of Nozkowski's characteristic formal twists. The background is an intricately marbleized cascade of diaphanous, sea-foam-green skeins over cerulean blue, a surface more precious and less labored than usual. Upon this oceanic expanse, fiery orange-red shapes--arranged like shards of shattered glass or a flagstone walkway--slowly slide downward through the bottom two-thirds of the painting. Erratically placed, these forms appear scattered, though they never actually touch or overlap--producing tensions between their opposing contours. Some of them can be coupled into symmetrical sets, which only complicates matters, hinting at some organizational principle that's forever indecipherable.
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