Van Doren Waxter

Van Doren Waxter is delighted to open an exhibition of five oil paintings on canvas and twelve works on paper in oil, oil stick and pastel by Tom Fairs (1925-2007), on view from January 5 – February 11, 2023 at 23 East 73rd Street. Fairs is recognized for a great range of mark-making and gesture with a quiet, skillful urgency, including a sense of structure in his compositions suffused with a sensitivity to light. The artist’s training in European Post-Impressionist artists such as Pierre Bonnard influenced the all over patterning of his drawings and paintings, evident in the artist’s lush, verdant works made during the last twenty years of his life. A concurrent exhibition of Hampstead Heath plein air pencil drawings by Fairs displayed alongside the gelatin silver prints of photographs by the New York artist, David Schoerner (b. 1984) will take place at Kerry Schuss Gallery from January 13-February 18, 2023. The works to go on view at Van Doren Waxter were made in Wales, Sussex, Cornwall and his beloved Hampstead Heath in London, a large ancient open area of land encompassing forests, ponds, and meadows. In the canvases, as is the case with much of his work, Fairs continually revisits and refines related images. These paintings display Fairs’ depictions of sweeping landscapes of the Welsh countryside. From a fixed point-of-view, Fairs created plein air paintings with a skewed perspective to convey the rolling green hills endemic to the region. Fairs was married to the English novelist Elisabeth Russell Taylor (1930–2020) from 1963 to his death in 2007. In 2019, Russell Taylor shared personal details about her husband’s artistic life and upbringing in a letter to the painter Bobbie Oliver, a longtime friend of the couple. The following is an excerpt from this letter, describing his life as an artist in retirement (edited for clarity), which will be included in a special remembrance to accompany the show: We took all our holidays to see painting and sculpture. He never felt anything but love and admiration for Bonnard. Among his favorite modern painters: Kitaj, Auerbach, Soutine–curious for working in such a different way from the way he worked and what he produced…He loved Giacometti…Tom admired anyone who was serious about drawing and painting. It didn’t matter if the person doing it didn’t achieve great works of art, it was the doing that mattered. Tom Fairs was born in London, England (1925) and lived in Hampstead, England. He studied at the Hornsey School of Art from 1948 to 1950 and at the Royal College of Art from 1950 to 1954, where he studied stained glass design and subsequently received glass commissions for the next twenty years. He taught fine art and stage design from 1967 to 1987 at the Central School of Art and Design (now Central Saint Martin’s) in London, England. From 1963 to his death in 2007, the artist shared his life with the novelist Elisabeth Russell Taylor. Their attic flat is within proximity to Hampstead Heath where, in his years of retirement from teaching, Fairs sketched daily. He passed away in 2007. His work has been on view in solo exhibitions internationally, such as Tom Fairs (2012) at The Modern Institute in Glasglow, Scotland and Tom Fairs: Homage to Bonnard (2008) at The Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate, Yorkshire and The New Grafton Gallery in London, England. He received solo exhibitions in New York City at Kerry Schuss (2011-2015). Fairs has been included in numerous group exhibitions, such as Drawn Together Again (2019) at Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY; Gaze (2018) at Van Doren Waxter, New York, NY; and Outside (2016) at Karma, Amagansett, NY, curated by Matthew Higgs. His work has been reviewed and featured in publications such as Artforum, Bomb, New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.

Van Doren Waxter is delighted to open an exhibition of paintings by Nevada City-based artist Evan Nesbit, on view from January 5 – February 11, 2023 at 23 East 73rd Street. In Nesbit’s Porosity series, the artist poses a fundamental question: How does one make a painting? These paintings are created through an innovative process in which Nesbit squeegees hand mixed acrylic paint through the verso of dyed burlap. India ink is used to draw on the burlap to introduce abstract shapes and now, figurative images. The burlap’s weave is pulled, cut into irregular pieces, and re-sewn into dynamic grids. The grid, an emblematic modernist motif usually implying rigidity and order, is playfully subverted in Nesbit’s sloping checkerboard patterning. As he pushes the paint through the pores of the fabric, textural protuberances seep out of the burlap weave in a restructuring of the act of painting. The new works included in the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery show the development of a pictorial method that builds upon the purely abstract forms in previous bodies of work. Grid and checkerboard patterns have taken new shape in pictographic marks that Nesbit has slowly introduced in his work over the last two years. Luncheon with Helen (2022) marks the first completed painting by Nesbit which incorporates this type of drawing. Depictions of leaves are interspersed between Nesbit’s emblematic stitched grids. Other images that appear in this series range from tote bags, celestial objects, and wagon wheels. The addition of figurative elements further allows for the artist to introduce subtle narratives to his once purely abstract images. Through both titles and pictorial forms, Nesbit develops a broader narrative arc, referencing the vibrant regional history of California. The exhibition’s title, Marbled and Bewildered, refers to a line from Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, Volume 3 in which a group of hash smokers are described as such. The novel focuses heavily on subjectivity and questions any objective nature of reality. In the title for this exhibition, Nesbit questions the subjectivity of the viewer and the objectivity of the art object. The painting Blue Electric Guillotine (2022) references a lyric from American indie rock band Pavement, formed in 1989 in Stockton, California. Totes (2022) depicts stacked tote bags composed in Nesbit’s trademark asymmetrical grid and associates the tote bags utilized within the local wheat industry. This set of new paintings utilizes narrative potential afforded by figuration to firmly situate Nesbit’s work in the physical location where it was created. Evan Nesbit (b. 1985) lives and works in Nevada City, California. He was educated at Yale University, New Haven, CT (MFA) and The San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA (BFA). In 2012, he received the Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Fund Prize from Yale University. Nesbit has held solo exhibitions at James Harris Gallery, Seattle, WA (2018,2015), Weiss Berlin, Berlin, Germany (2017), Koki Arts, Tokyo, Japan (2016,2014), Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy (2016) and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA (2016,2014). His work has been presented in group exhibitions at Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France, Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy, Sean Kelly, New York, NY, among others.

“Paint is as much a thing of life, precious and important to me. I wait upon it as servant rather than master.” -Milton Resnick Van Doren Waxter is pleased to announce Milton Resnick: Hawkeye—an exhibition of paintings and works on paper made by the artist (1927-2004) in the 1970s, on view at 23 East 73rd Street from November 3 to December 23, 2022. Organized with the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, the presentation includes a special loan of archival and historical material; a public program to take place at the gallery’s uptown 1907 townhouse; and a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue with an essay by Klaus Ottmann, curator, writer, and chief curator emeritus of the Phillips Collection. A concurrent downtown presentation at the Foundation of work made by Resnick in the following decade, Milton Resnick: 1980s, further explores the artist’s all out embrace of scale, density, and surface between the 1970s and 1980s. The gallery exhibition includes nine canvases and five works on paper made by Resnick between 1972 and 1979. The year prior, 1971, the artist was the subject of a one person traveling museum exhibition organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, during which the late director Henry Hopkins enthused of Resnick, “the method is an all-over frontal attack.” Taking place across all floors of Van Doren Waxter and with a vitrine of biographical material that explores this period in his life and art practice, the presentation marks the first time works from the artist’s subtly charged and geologic “Hawkeye” series (1972)—a period when his fascination with paint as a material intensified and he began making denser paintings and in a darker palette—have ever been shown together. “Hawks are a symbol of power,” Ottmann writes in the show’s essay, and, “Resnick’s paintings of the 1970s have the power to devour: light, color, one’s self, and the world.” Ottmann, in his lyrical and scholarly text, adds a remark by Resnick that appeared years earlier in ARTnews, “What I like is a painting to act in many different directions at once, so strongly that it will shatter itself and open up a small crack, which will suck the world in.” Hawkeye 6 and Hawkeye 15, both 1972, are sublime and radiant acid green oils with yellow and blue brushstrokes with thickly layered crusts, while the creamy acrylic Hawkeye 12 (1972) in darker, romantic hues has an absorbing, enveloping quality. The critic Robert Hughes declared that same year in Time that “light drifts slowly up through the paint and glows silently on the surface” of Resnick’s canvases and is “controlled by an iron will to form.” Reviewing the same show of work by the artist on view in New York, David L. Shirey writing in The New York Times, asserted that Resnick’s “large, loaded surfaces” are “forceful and original.” The show includes an immensely scaled 1979 oil measuring six feet across from his “Elephant” (1979-1983) paintings, which Ottmann describes as “surfaces built up with thick impasto until they resemble an elephant’s hide, or appear fortified like protective armor.” The presentation also includes five vertical acrylic on paper sheets measuring three by two feet across in a myriad of earthy, romantic hues, recalling the late Linda L. Cathcart’s assertion that Resnick’s “vast canvases of color are evocative of the processes of change found in nature…the passages of color pull at one another and pierce one another, and the strokes form shapes tight and loose, open and closed.” Hawkeye is Van Doren Waxter’s inaugural presentation of Milton Resnick since announcing exclusive representation in 2021. The artist, whose decades-long career was characterized by revolutions, departures, and an obsession with paint—“paint, that’s all I have”—is today celebrated for his later monumental paintings remarkable for their immensity and materiality. The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, exhibits, publishes, and preserves his work in the artist’s former home and studio, resnickpasslof.org. Public program On Thursday, November 17 at 5:30 p.m., join Klaus Ottmann, curator, writer, and chief curator emeritus of the Phillips Collection and Geoffrey Dorfman, painter, Milton Resnick biographer, and a trustee of the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, at the gallery’s 23 East 73rd townhouse for a discussion about the artist.

Van Doren Waxter announces Jackie Saccoccio: Tempestuous at its 1907 historical townhouse at 23 East 73rd Street from September 8 to October 29. The exhibition of paintings and works on paper made in the last two years of her life is the first exhibition of the artist’s since her passing and will take place across the second and third floors of the gallery. A painter renowned for her large-scale, radiant abstractions and adventurous, body aware use of the canvas as a painting tool, Saccocio (1963-2020) is recognized for a highly physical practice that favored chance, gravity, time, and control, as she tipped, dragged, and shook her paintings over one another. An illustrated exhibition catalogue accompanies the exhibition with a moving and revelatory essay by artist and friend Carroll Dunham (b. 1945). Art critic Roberta Smith, writing in Saccoccio’s obituary in The New York Times, situated her “explosive yet delicately structured, almost atmospheric abstract paintings that exploited paint’s fluidity” which “needed to be looked at over time to get a full sense of their complex, ravishing beauty” within a “generation of female artists now in their 40s and 50s who added a new vitality to abstract painting beginning around the turn of the 21st century.” Her large paintings “on which expansive waves and splashes of bright, luminous color seemed to swirl and clash amid networks of dripped lines running in several directions…seemed to hover before the viewer like an overactive, sumptuously colored cloud.” The twelve paintings and fourteen works on paper evidence an unabashed bravado and invoke a comment the artist made about her late work, which made her think of the “explosive nature of a tempest.” Formally, Saccoccio preferred scale and space, confessing to an interviewer she thought she was going to be an architect. “But I realized that it wasn’t buildings that I wanted to make but rather some kind of connection with space–delving into this vertiginous space, trying to make something out of that. It was always an illusionistic space, though, not a real space.” A significantly scaled abstraction, Portrait (Scarred Faceless), 2020, measuring six by eight feet across anchors the presentation, with Saccoccio at her most confrontational and fluid, and as Dunham says, one of her “most beautiful.” He writes that he struggled to accept her large paintings as “portraits” despite the fact that many are titled “as such.” However, he adds, “after she died, I started to think again about the ‘portraiture’ as being of her, herself” and “one can easily imagine a residual ‘face’…its journey through its ‘life’ (a result, and a casualty, of materials and procedures) has pushed it toward vanishing, but the mind’s eye knows it’s there and the body’s eye wants to see it.” Untitled (2020) is an optically thrilling, kinetic canvas of richly hued cords and gassy veils of color, recalling Saccocio’s comment that she wanted “to make a static object seem like it’s moving.” While another oil on linen, also Untitled, demonstrates how the experimental painter used her body to create “abstraction at full throttle”—a liquid-like expanse has an incredible force that suggests wind, a flood, or sorcery. The show includes a suite of brightly pigmented compositions on paper, remarkable for their energy. The drawings continued her ongoing experiments with pattern, line, and color, and show her working rigorously, playfully, and “like a tempest,” with a sense of magic and explosiveness.

an Doren Waxter is pleased to present James Brooks: Rendez-vous Paintings 1972 - 1983, an exhibition of paintings by the exemplary Abstract Expressionist James Brooks. On view from June 8 through August 19, 2022 at Van Doren Waxter’s 23 E 73rd street townhouse gallery, this survey will showcase a series of paintings from the 1970s and 80s. These works display a period of Brooks’ oeuvre where he opened up the pictorial space dramatically, all while maintaining a strong sense of drawing and line. James Brooks (1906-1992) arrived in New York City in 1926. During the Great Depression, he worked as a muralist under the Works Progress Administration and studied representational painting at the Art Students League. In 1942–amidst the rise of Abstract Expressionism in America–Brooks was drafted to serve in the United States Army as an Art Correspondent. While based in Cairo, he photographed troops in Palestine, Benghazi, Libya, and throughout Egypt, creating drawings and gouache paintings from photographs. His 1945 return to New York came with a shift away from figuration and towards the abstract paintings he is most known for. Brooks openly credited the artistic influence of his friends and peers–Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, and Bradley Walker Tomlin were all influences as he explored abstraction. Rather than dripping paint across an entire canvas like Pollock, Brooks dripped paint onto a small region of a surface, shifting the canvas so each drip would dry in different directions. His 1940s paintings were influenced by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. Later in his career, he became interested in the surrealists pursuit of artmaking as an access point for unconscious thought. Brooks’ paintings from the 1970s and 80s included in this exhibition are marked by his continued experimentation and exploration. With a body of work defined by continued innovation, he strove to avoid “nausea with one’s own pictorial cliches,”–often revisiting incomplete paintings that he began years earlier, reworking them until satisfied. This process lent itself to a style that was paradoxically visually consistent and ever-changing. Well known for his restrained approach to painting, Brooks maintained an inventive practice. He regularly utilized atypical tools and processes. In earlier paintings from the 1950s, after accidentally dripping acrylic paint onto the backside of an absorbent Bennis cloth (used for grain feed bags), he would use a squeegee pushing the paint to the front creating fractured forms. Immediately drawn to the shapes created by these stains, he found them very compelling as a way to interrupt his own habits or ways of working. In the later paintings of the 1970s and 1980s he would continue to lay the canvas on the floor and use a squeegee but on the surface of the paintings, spreading the acrylic paint into sweeping fields of color. The line that he introduced became not a drip caused by swinging the paint laden brush, but as a decisive, hard line with intended direction.

Van Doren Waxter is pleased to announce an exhibition of nine new paintings by Los Angeles artist Laurie Nye go on view at the gallery’s 1907 townhouse at 23 East 73rd Street from April 28 to June 3, 2022. Nye’s radiant, psychedelic oil on linen paintings are characterized by her interests in color, symbolism, and painterliness. Her brilliant palette, as Jane McFadden writing in Artforum asserts, “refuses any adherence to reality and brings to mind Fauvism’s reconfiguration of painting’s relationship to color.” The show takes places on the third floor and is on view concurrently with an exhibition of canvasses on the second floor by Los Angeles artist Joshua Nathanson. A prolific painter (b. 1972), Nye trained in figurative drawing and painting at Memphis College of Art and earned a Master of Fine Arts California Institute of the Arts. She typically works on multiple large-scale canvases at once and during the pandemic began retreating to her family's quiet, verdant Tennessee home. The result is a body of smaller works produced slowly and one at a time on an easel in her mother’s kitchenette. The highly activated, dynamic abstractions, mostly 24 by 20 or 28 by 22 inches, are affecting for the artist’s vivid brushwork and concentrated use of color and line. At a young age Nye was encouraged to cultivate her love of freedom, imagination, and nature; and she confesses a fascination with flowers, “dealing with flowers and reconstructing them and getting the essence,” especially irises. Purple Iris (2022) demonstrates Nye’s deeply felt feeling for the flora, as does Spring Flowers with Moon (2020), which evinces both her deft use of line to break up the picture plane and ability overall to create a sense of painterly space. Sunflower with Birds in Lucy (2022), the largest in the exhibition, glows and radiates and suggests a mythology or science fiction. Taken together, Nye's sublime depictions of the natural world are a place of self-discovery, connection, and celebration. About the artist Laurie Nye (b. 1972, Memphis, TN) received her BFA from the Memphis College of Art (Memphis, TN), and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA). In December 2021, Laurie Nye’s solo exhibition, “It Wasn’t A Dream It Was A Flood,” at Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) was an Artforum Best of Year 2021 feature. Nye's work is currently part of a group exhibition "Here Comes the Suns," at Bark Berlin Gallery (Berlin, Germany). In April 2021, Laurie Nye’s artist project, “Chickasaw Moon,” at Odd Ark (Los Angeles, CA) was the subject of an Artforum Critic’s Pick. Laurie Nye’s work has recently been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Bark Berlin Gallery (Berlin, Germany); The Pit (Glendale, CA), Odd Ark (Los Angeles, CA); Big Pictures LA (Los Angeles) Blake and Vargas, (Berlin, Germany); The Dot Project, (London, UK); Day and Night Gallery (Atlanta, GA); La Loma Projects, (Pasadena, CA); and Unpaved Gallery (Yucca Valley, CA). Her work has been reviewed in such publications as Artillery, Los Angeles Times, Artforum, FAD Magazine and LA Weekly. Nye lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Van Doren Waxter is delighted to announce representation of Los Angeles artist Joshua Nathanson and an exhibition of new paintings to go on view at the gallery’s 1907 townhouse at 23 East 73rd Street from April 28 to June 3, 2022. The eleven paintings and seven works on paper are a stylistic shift for the artist, reflecting his love of art history, paint, and formal interests in viscosity, transparency, and materiality. This is Nathanson’s first solo exhibition with Van Doren Waxter and follows his two-person exhibition (2019) at the gallery, as well as one-person shows in Los Angeles, Seoul, Shanghai, and Tokyo and acquisitions by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Nathanson is an adventurous, experimental painter (b. 1976) who earned his Master of Fine Arts from Art Center College of Art and Design in Pasadena. His influences range from the grand modernist Henri Matisse, to the materially inventive Sigmar Polke, to the cartoonish, gestural Philip Guston. Inventive, physical, and social, he is interested in technique and process and frequently organizes drawing parties with other painters as a “way to get out of my own head.” A scrap from a recent gathering was collaged into Get Apple (2022). This method is one of many strategies used to manifest ideas that are hidden from resting consciousness, which Nathanson describes as a necessary way to “throw myself off-balance.” Other strategies include: pouring paint, adding solvents, automatic painting/drawing, or adding collaged elements like tissue paper. The artist’s hallucinatory, thickly built-up works made in an unfettered, unscripted, and all out approach—“going in, going nuts”—with squeegees, poured paint and accumulated paper, and his fingers continue his use of hybridity and humor both as a tool and a lure for exploring a full range of human experiences including his vulnerabilities and fears. In a thrilling departure from the sleek, flat canvasses he has produced for nearly a decade made with digital and traditional techniques that he says “read like a screen and pure color,” the new paintings are now “much more physical and material…doing only the things paint can do.” In layered, richly hued compositions such as You Are Not a Camera (2022), Nathanson invokes a range of references and images, from the everyday to dreams, fairy tales, and childhood. The vibrant, collaged Channel Changer (2022) evidences the artist’s interest in creating fantastical scenes of everyday life: a group of oranges radiates within a highly expressive canvas populated with mysterious beings and liquified expanses. The presentation includes lush, ebullient works on paper, such as Hiding in the Grass (2021) and The Weight of a Horse (2021) that are dazzling and kaleidoscopic in their compositions of figures, energetic patterns, and forms. Joshua Nathanson was born 1976 in Washington, D.C. and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Nathanson studied at The School of Visual Arts, New York, NY (BFA) and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA (MFA). The artist's solo and two-person exhibitions include Yuz Museum, Shanghai, CN; Van Doren Waxter, New York, NY (two-person); Downs and Ross, New York, NY; Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tokyo, JP; Luce Gallery, Turin, IT; and at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA / Seoul, KR. Group exhibitions include: Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK; Yokohama Museum, Yokohama, JP; and 356 S. Mission, Los Angeles, CA. Joshua Nathanson’s work is included in the permanent museum collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, CN.