New York painter Joan Nelson will show recent landscape paintings on wood panel and paintings on paper in her one person exhibition at the Michael Kohn Gallery. Nelson is widely recognized as a dominant artist in post-modern landscape painting. Culling images from diverse sources as the Italian Renaissance and American 19th century artists, Nelson melds these details of landscape into her own vision.

While the practice of using art historical sources is not a new idea (everyone from Lichtenstein to Picasso to Ingres, et al, did it), Joan Nelson has overtly adapted the Romantic ethereality of the art of the 18th and 19th Centuries and combined it with direct quotations from earlier works, and also with direct painting from nature. The result is a pristine oil painting on wood panel that conveys both the richness of history and the palette and composition of contemporary art.

Joan Nelson has shown her work in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and has had one person exhibitions at the St. Louis Museum of Art and the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston. In addition to these museums, her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.