Continuing its commitment to the exhibition of works on paper, Senior & Shopmaker Gallery is pleased to inaugurate its new space at 210 Eleventh Avenue in Chelsea with an exhibition of drawings and seldom seen hand-colored prints by Thomas Nozkowski. The show will include work produced over nearly two decades, and seeks to shed light on the integral connections between the artist’s drawings, paintings on paper, and printmaking endeavors.

For over thirty years, Nozkowski has practiced his own form of idiosyncratic abstraction, foregoing a signature style or subject matter in favor of seemingly limitless variations in form and nuanced color. Though the artist claims his images are drawn from the everyday world and personal experience, their literal sources are obscured, leaving only the faintest suggestion of the familiar. Like artist forbears Jean Arp, Paul Klee, and often Joan Miro, Nozkowski works on an intimate scale particularly well suited to works on paper, and whose detail and variation are demanding of the viewer’s focused study.

Drawings are often revelatory of the artist’s decision-making process and permit experimentation not always apparent in paintings on canvas. Nozkowski employs a wide range of materials on paper, including graphite, colored pencil, ink, crayon, gouache, and oil singly or in some combination. They form a distinct body of work within his oeuvre, not as studies for paintings but as tangential lines of thought offering the artist different paths and intentions perhaps begun in painting but often existing independently of it.

Nozkowski has created some forty print editions since 1990, and the genesis of this body of work is tied intimately to the drawing process. Beginning with an oil on paper, the collaborating printmaker prepares a plate holding an elemental background and figure, the first proofs of which serve as a framework for the artist’s subsequent revisions and additions. Nozkowski draws upon and hand-colors these early proofs to develop new images to be translated again into aquatint, woodcut, lithography, or screenprint. In the intaglio process in particular, the artist alters these initial matrices by adding further plates and colors, but also by burnishing and scraping away sections of the image on the plate—a process he uses continually in paintings on canvas, which undergo countless revision in the artist’s studio. From the mutability of this hand-coloring process arise multiple images which may develop into series or sequences of editioned images, as seen in the sets of five to seven etchings with aquatint produced with Simmelink Sukimoto Editions in recent years.

Thomas Nozkowski was born in 1944 in Teaneck, NJ and resides in New York City and High Falls, New York. Most recently his work was the subject of a major survey organized by Marc Mayer at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. In 2007, Nozkowski’s works were included in Robert Storr’s exhibition at the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind – Art in the Present Tense. The artist’s work is included in numerous public collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, among others. He will exhibit new paintings at Pace Wildenstein Gallery in November 2010.