Thomas Nozkowski (March 23, 1944 – May 9, 2019) was an American

contemporary painter Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic com ...

. He achieved a place of prominence through his small scale paintings and drawings that push the limits of visual language.

Early life and education

Nozkowski was born in Teaneck, New Jersey and raised in Dumont, where he graduated from Dumont High School in 1961. He spent his youth in the New Jersey suburbs, admiring New York culture from afar before moving there after graduating high school. His father worked in an Alcoa Aluminum factory and then as a postman. His mother worked in factories and as a bookkeeper. One of his aunts was a schoolteacher who gave him and his younger sister art supplies. When he was a senior in high school he won a scholarship to attend a painting class at New York University's School of Education, where he studied with Robert Kaupelis and Hale Woodruff. While he earned his BFA at

Cooper Union The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique in ...

, Nozkowski was making sculptures. He graduated in 1967. He later transitioned to painting, and exhibited some of his earliest works in group shows at the storied Betty Parsons Gallery.

Career

In the early 1970s, after several years of making large scale paintings Nozkowski reacted to the macho scale of both Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, and decided to work small, and on the easel — initially painting on 16-by-22-inch pieces of art-store canvas board. By 1979, he had found an audience for his work in New York. Through a number of solo exhibitions at 55 Mercer Gallery and Rosa Esman Gallery in the 1980s, along with The Museum of Modern Art acquiring his work in 1982, his reputation for creating evocative drawings, prints, and paintings was solidified. For more than four decades, Nozkowski painted almost every day, often in his studio in upstate New York. He had over 80 one-person shows of his work, most recently at the Pace Gallery which has represented him since 2008. Among his significant exhibitions were surveys at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1987, Ludwig Museum in 2007 and

Fisher Landau Center The Fisher Landau Center for Art is a private foundation located in Long Island City, in Queens, New York City, United States. It offered regular exhibitions of contemporary art, open to the public from 12 to 5pm, Thursdays through Mondays, until ...

in 2008. Nozkowski appeared in the main exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale curated by Rob Storr. He was the subject of a retrospective of works on paper at the

New York Studio School The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture at 8 West 8th Street, in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York City, New York State is an art school formed in 1963 by a group of students and their teacher, Mercedes Matter, all of ...

in 2003 and a career retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada in 2009. Other exhibitions include, ''70 Years of Abstract Painting - Excerpts'', 2011, curated by

Stephanie Buhmann Stephanie Buhmann (born 1977) is a German art critic, art historian, and curator. Born and raised in Hamburg, Germany, she lives in New York City and Lübeck, Germany. Her book series "Studio Conversations" focuses on contemporary female artists ...

at Jason McCoy Gallery, New York. His work was written about and admired by art critics including Peter Schjeldahl, Marjorie Welish,

John Yau John Yau (born June 5, 1950) is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists' books, fiction ...

and Robert Storr.

Achievements

Nozkowski's long career includes achievements such as a 1993

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

for Creative Arts, a 1999 award for painting from The American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2008, the President's Citation of

. In 2010, Nozkowski was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Collections

* Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York * Museum of Fine Arts Boston, *

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...

New York, * Morgan Library and Museum, New York * Museum of Modern Art, New York * Phillips Collection, Washington, DC * San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nozkowski, Thomas 1944 births 2019 deaths 20th-century American artists 21st-century American artists Cooper Union alumni Dumont High School alumni New York University alumni People from Dumont, New Jersey People from Teaneck, New Jersey Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters