Painter of Modest, Ineffable Abstractions, Thomas Nozkowski Died at 75 Years

Thomas Nozkowski, whose quiet paintings, drawings and abstract patterns evoke notions of landscapes and cosmic forms, died at age 75. The Pace Gallery, which represents the artist, confirmed the news.

In a statement, Arne and Marc Glimcher, the chairman and president and CEO of Pace, respectively, said in a statement: "Tom was a great innovative painter and a wonderful friend, he leaves a space that cannot be easily filled, but that such an incredible gift has been for all of us. Thomas added brilliance to every life he touched. His work modified the way we all see the world.

Nozkowski's paintings were often based on natural scenes he observed, but rarely revealed their original material. As a result, describing your vision could be a challenge. In Artforum, in 2000, Barry Schwabsky wrote: "It is often said that art tests language and is rarely as true as in the case of Nozkowski's paintings".

With their combinations of colors similar to those of Matisse and their organic forms of the Miro, the works of Nozkowski remembered places or things that their creator had glimpsed in the world. He described his paintings as memory devices. "By associating a color, a sign or a shape to a memory, we have more property and can cling to it," Nozkowski told ARTnews in 2016.

Nozkowski began painting during the 1960s, when conceptualism was in vogue and his medium of choice was considered a fad. Shortly after he began creating mature works, the New York colleagues responded to the stylistic change by experimenting with the pictorial process. Jack Whitten, for example, began to draw the acrylic through the canvases using a squeegee, and Lynda Benglis confronted the qualities of the painting by pouring it to make sculpture. Nozkowski's innovation was to drastically reduce the non-figurative compositions associated with abstract expressionists and to work on a small scale, making his abstractions simple and unlovely. The washes that acted as backgrounds for his compositions were often left uneven, so that the paint droplets seemed to have formed on his canvases.

One of Nozkowski's preferred formats was a 16-by-20-inch canvas, in which he painted blob circles and grid-shaped drawings, sometimes on thin washes. If they had been painted on a large scale, the star and burst forms could have more visual drama, but Nozkowski was happy to resign himself to placidity and underestimation, so that viewers could find energy within them on their own.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: http://www.artnews.com/2019/05/09/thomas-nozkowski-dead/