Thomas
Nozkowski
Abstracts reveal checkered past, future
For 40 years, art collector Michael Berger has shared his love of contemporary art with the locals: First by opening up his Shadyside home on weekends for public exhibits of works by his favorite artists, then by opening full-fledged art galleries at a succession of locations, from Shadyside to Penn Circle to Point Breeze.
Now Berger has moved again, this time to the South Side, just below the Terminal Buildings, to part of a large industrial complex he owns that recently was vacated by the former tenant, Allegheny Intermediate Unit.
"In this economy, I figured, why pay rent," Berger says of the move, which has another bonus. "It's about five times as large as the space we had in Point Breeze."
Still, this first exhibit in the new space is rather small, featuring nine works by Thomas Nozkowski, a painter and printmaker from New York City.
Seven new prints "are all about checkerboard patterns that look a little bit like you are looking into a funhouse mirror," Berger says.
For example, "Untitled #1" features a wavering checkerboard that gives way to cloud-shaped formations constructed of horizontal bands of horizontal, colored lines. Some of the squares from the checkerboard skitter over the bars of color. The push-pull between foreground and background tricks the eye and fools the mind.
In "Untitled #3," a gray and yellow checkerboard pattern appears sharply punctured as if to reveal four large color blocks beneath the picture plane.
And in "Untitled #5," Nozkowski's color choice is minimalized to four small squares that give way to an all-encompassing checkerboard pattern yet again.
"Untitled #4" contains an odd shape that appears to be organized so that we might follow Nozkowski's own deviations from its beginning, as though making the works was a kind of game in which a modification to the rules forced a change in everything that had come before.
In these works, as in all of his, Nozkowski manages to blow out the formal conventions of early modernist abstraction through the use of unconventional shapes and an unusual palette.
Nozkowski was born in New Jersey in 1944. He received his bachelor of fine arts degree from the Cooper Union in 1967. Since then, he has become a critically acclaimed and influential abstract painter.
Highly regarded by other professional artists across the country, Berger says that both times he has shown Nozkowski's work, he has gotten calls from artists who want to show at the gallery as well. "He's an artist's artist," Berger says. "I can't tell you how many artists have contacted us who want to show their work in our gallery because we show Tom's work."
As an artist, he has been described as a "post-minimal formalist," by LA Weekly and as "the Chardin of contemporary abstraction," by The New Yorker. His painting and composition involve the interplay of biomorphic and geometric forms, which heave and rock against each other.
Over the years, his small and medium-sized paintings on panel or paper have been characterized by innovative color and composition. And although they seem purely abstract, Nozkowski's work is based on close observation of his surroundings. Abstracted forms are derived from shapes and patterns found in nature and from manmade objects in the urban environment. This inspiration provides unexpected arrangements of color and form that can be equally jarring or beautiful, and always strikingly original in feeling.
The two acrylic paintings -- "Untitled (R-8)" and "Untitled (R-4)" -- contain more linear explorations, containing hard-edged shapes or lines that look as though put together piecemeal, drawn or painted on as needed. In those works, the shapes become the focal point, at times almost appearing as objects in space that have no clear origin.
Being that all of the works are coded by number and purposely not titled, Nozkowski has allowed plenty of room for interpretation. The abstract forms become the center of attention without alluding to the real objects in the artist's memory which gave birth to them.
But even so, it is evident in each that Nozkowski has combined the elementary with the unfamiliar to arrive at something accomplished and strangely affective.
Furthermore, for most viewers, the abstract forms are a two-way bridge back to the viewer's memory bank, evoking images, and parts of images or forms stored there. Hard looking will be rewarded with this artist.
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