Thomas Nozkowski
"Thomas Nozkowski" by Nick Ostoff, Fall 2008, pp. 136-7
For more than 30 years, Thomas Nozkowski has practised a highly personal form of abstract painting. While championed by the likes of Barry Schwabsky and Robert Storr, he has nonetheless remained relatively marginalized within the art world. This small, elegantly installed survey exhibition of 20 paintings made between 1979 and 2003 provided not only an ideal introduction to his work, but also a demonstration of why he deserves greater recognition.
The works in the exhibition, like all the works in Nozkowski’s oeuvre, are small. The majority measure merely 16 by 20 inches; none exceeds 30 by 40 inches. (Nozkowski’s initial decision to work at this size was political. As he explained in a 2004 interview, “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 fi t in my friends’ rooms.”) In keeping with this sense of modesty, many of the works are painted on canvas board, a cheap, flimsy support often found in high-school art classes. Furthermore, all of his works are untitled, which is significant for a painter who works with abstract forms. In the absence of any verbal cues, the viewer must engage with the work on purely visual terms. Nozkowski’s works are united by his compositional approach. Each painting is inspired by elements drawn from day-to-day life and contains an abstract form, or group of forms, set against a predominantly monochrome background. The work is predicated on the formal relationship between figure and ground. (This differentiates him from many other contemporary abstract painters, who tend to employ unified surface treatments and all-over compositional structures.)
Remarkably, these narrow—and potentially limiting—parameters provide Nozkowski with a great degree of creative freedom. His work contains a vast array of colours and forms articulated through an equally vast array of painterly effects, ranging from scumbling to drips and from impastoed brush strokes to areas of matte, flat colour that appear almost digitally engendered. Yet this vocabulary is used with great consideration and restraint. Each painting is a distinctly self-contained entity, imbued with a specific energy, light and atmosphere—like a miniaturized world within a larger cosmos.
Untitled (4-11) (1981–83), one of the earliest pieces in the show, is minimal, featuring a small black asymmetrical form placed on a drab grey background that has been covered with stains of a darker grey. The form is both enigmatic and evocative—it suggests a material object, such as a woman’s skirt, or alternatively some type of hole or portal receding into deep space. Either way, it is steeped in solemn austerity. In sharp contrast is Untitled (7-140) (2000), in which a buoyant white bubble covered in flatly painted coloured dots floats on a slightly variegated blue field that is covered by a grid of small white lines scratched into the paint. The difference between figure and ground here is striking: it is as if the bubble has floated in from another painting, or from a children’s cartoon. The show’s most recent work, Untitled (8-37) (2003), is also the most mysterious. It shows the imprint or shadow of an amorphous, vaguely human figure on a lush green field, suggesting both presence and absence. Two coloured spheres at the bottom of the canvas, one orange and one brown, strangely anchor the figure in place.
The elusive nature of Nozkowski’s paintings makes it tempting to try to describe them in detail. Yet words seem inadequate: they are rooted in the ineffability of visual experience and reside outside the discourses that have dominated and defined abstract painting over the past 30 years. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who are either in dialogue with the legacy of modernist abstraction or concerned with issues within contemporary culture at large, Nozkowski looks inward, relying on introspection, intuition and visual invention. The two artists with whom he has the closest kinship, Raoul De Keyser and Tomma Abts, are separated by a wide generational gap. Like their works, Nozkowski’s paintings are made on singular terms. Through close, considered viewing, they also yield equally singular rewards.
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
