Nicole Wittenberg – Them There Eyes
November 7 – December 23, 2018
Opening reception: November 7, 6 – 8 PM
Nicole Wittenberg, Paolo, 2018, Wax and pigment on canvas, 87 x 63 inches
Press Release
Installation Images
yours mine & ours is pleased to present Them There Eyes, the gallery’s second show with Nicole Wittenberg. This series of large drawings on canvas of the artist’s friends were all made from life and can be seen as an exploration of intimacy, appearance and presence.
In this exhibition Wittenberg has extended her drawing practice to enlarge the scale of the mark and to expand the energy of the image. The black marks move rhythmically and broadly over the surface: wax and pigment have been applied with a broom onto canvas, as a means of increasing the scale while retaining a sense of the spontaneous and immediate.
Each portrait was drawn in the studio, never posed or directed, lending a feeling of closeness and movement as the sitter breaths and shifts their gaze; this is the essence of living, the gestures of naturalness. The weights of the drawn marks fluctuate, moving in and around the faces, hands, and bodies, pushing back against the contained and static quality of a photograph. Just as Billie Holiday once cooed, I fell in love with you the first time I looked into them there eyes, Wittenberg takes us to that place, where appearances reveal personalities and faces become friends.
Nicole Wittenberg lives and works in New York. Recent exhibitions include Look! New Acquisitions at the Albertina, Vienna, Austria, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, Galerie Lisa Kandlehofer, Vienna; The Female Gaze, Part Two, Cheim & Read, New York, NY; Nice Weather Skarstedt Gallery, New York, NY; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA. She was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters John Koch award for best young figurative painter in 2012. Her work is included in the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Aishti Foundation, Beirut; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. Wittenberg received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003