Janice Nowinski: Bodies of Paint
@ Riverside Arts Center Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden
32 E Quincy St, Riverside, IL 60546
Opening Saturday, September 28th, from 2PM - 5PM
On view through Saturday, October 12th
RAC’s Freeark Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition: Janice Nowinski: Bodies of Paint. A reception and gallery talk will take place on Saturday, September 28th from 2-5pm, with a conversation between Janice Nowinski and Kyle Staver, moderated by Anne Harris, at 3pm. The exhibition is on view from September 8 – October 12, 2019, and is curated by Anne Harris.
RAC is thrilled to present Brooklyn-based painter Janice Nowinski’s solo exhibition Bodies of Paint. This is the artist’s first exhibition in the Chicago area. We’ll be exhibiting nineteen paintings. The earliest is from 2009, but most were made in the last four years.
Janice Nowinski spends months, sometimes years, working on small figurative paintings. Her subjects are suspended between flesh and paint. They barely cohere—one slip, and they’re just a smear. The paintings are felt into place to find a just-so balance of opposites: blunt, tender, awkward, graceful, remote, intimate and exposed. This is the result of perfect pitch painting—the subtlest color, the most nuanced edges, figure/ground finesse, and again, that tightly stretched line between paint and its transformation into light, air, space, weight and flesh.
Nowinski is now associated with current trends in contemporary figuration—painterly allegorical inventions that channel art history and politics. However, that connection is happenstance. Her work today actually reflects 40 years of slow maturation. She is sincerely old-school, part of a tribe of painters who build on tradition and share faith that tenacity and dissatisfaction will lead to originality. Her inspirations are numerous but obviously include Rembrandt, Cezanne and Soutine. She’s in conversation with leading contemporary figurative artists but also stands alone. Her work’s intimacy, subtlety, slowness and deliberate lack of grandeur sets it apart. Leon Kossoff comes to mind. She’s a painter’s painter.
“Painting is damn difficult—you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.” –Paul Cezanne
–Anne Harris
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Tags: Anne Harris, Bodies of Paint, Freeark Gallery, Janice Nowinski, Kyle Staver, Riverside, Riverside Arts Center
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