Van Doren Waxter

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.