Thomas Nozkowski
Thomas Nozkowski
About Thomas Nozkowski
For over forty years, Thomas Nozkowski (1944-2019) practiced his own form of idiosyncratic abstraction, foregoing a signature style or subject matter in favor of seemingly limitless variations in form and nuanced color. Though the artist claimed his images were drawn from the everyday world and personal experience, their literal sources are obscured, leaving only the faintest suggestion of the familiar. Like artist forbears Jean Arp, Paul Klee, and often Joan Miro, Nozkowski worked on an intimate scale particularly well suited to works on paper` whose detail and variation are demanding of the viewer’s focused study. A masterful printmaker, Nozkowski’s editioned works were integrally connected to his drawings and paintings and as tangential lines of thought offering the artist different paths and intentions perhaps begun in painting but often existing independently of it.
E-Catalogue: Thomas Nozkowski, Works on Paper 1991-2008
Nozkowski created some forty-five print editions since 1990, and the genesis of this body of work is tied intimately to the drawing process. Beginning with an oil on paper, the collaborating printmaker would prepare a plate holding an elemental background and figure, the first proofs of which served as a framework for the artist’s subsequent revisions and additions. Nozkowski drew upon and hand-colored these early proofs to develop new images to be translated again into aquatint, woodcut, lithography, or screenprint. In the intaglio process in particular, the artist altered these initial matrices by adding further plates and colors, but also by burnishing and scraping away sections of the image on the plate—a process he used continually in paintings on canvas, which customarily underwent countless revisions in the artist’s studio. From the mutability of this hand-coloring process would arise multiple images some of which developed into series or sequences of editioned images, as seen in the sets of five to seven etchings with aquatint produced with Simmelink/Sukimoto Editions in recent years.
Thomas Nozkowski was born in 1944 in Teaneck, NJ and resided in New York City and High Falls, New York. His work was the subject of a major survey organized by Marc Mayer at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. In 2007, Nozkowski’s works were included in Robert Storr’s exhibition at the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind – Art in the Present Tense. The artist’s work is included in numerous public collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, among others. The artist’s estate is represented by Pace Gallery, New York.
E-Catalogue: Thomas Nozkowki, The Complete Prints 1990-2015