Thomas Nozkowski: The Mysterious Beauty of Everything

Sunday, November 8th, 2–6 PM

Please join us for a walkthrough of The Mysterious Beauty of Everything, featuring works by Thomas Nozkowski, led by curator and poet John Yau alongside artist and Art Cake co-founder Cordy Ryman and artist, curator and educator Michael David. The walkthrough will be followed by a conversation and Q&A.

We will also be celebrating the openings of Janet Jaffke: Letter to My Father in Gallery B and Patricia Tewes Richards: Fliers and Crawlers in Gallery C. The opening receptions will begin at 2:00 PM, with the walkthrough starting at 4:00 PM.

The following press release was written by John Yau for the exhibition:

This is the first posthumous exhibition in New York devoted to the drawings of Thomas Nozkowski (1944–2019).

Ever since I met Tom through our mutual friend, Catherine Murphy, and began writing about his work, first for Pace (2008) and later his first monograph, Thomas Nozkowski (2017), I have wanted to do a show of his drawings. While he largely worked on three sizes of paintings, starting with 16 x 20 inch prepared canvas board, effectively rejecting the heroic scale of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism—what he called the “elephant in the room”—he did his drawings on different sizes in different mediums, from gouache, graphite, ink, and collage to colored pencil and ballpoint pen. This openness to experiment, which was also true of his paintings, culminated in a distinct body of work, at once joyful, playful, and surprising. He reimagined many of the tropes of abstract art, such as the grid, making something fresh and vital appear. Basing all his work on something directly experienced, from something seen on one of his many hikes in the Catskills, to a book or poem he read, to a painting or movie he saw, Nozkowski pioneered a fruitful path through the many strictures and assumptions governing painting and subject matter, beginning in the 1960s. Including works on paper done between 1986 and 2016, this exhibition honors Nozkowski’s intrepid and indefatigable spirit, the inspiration he provided for generations of younger artists.

I would like to thank Casimir Nozkowski and Joyce Robins, Michael David, Pace Gallery, Cordy Ryman, and Art Cake for making this exhibition possible.

— John Yau