Van Doren Waxter

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.