Focusing on the artist’s practice during the 1970s and 1980s, this presentation, titled Thomas Nozkowski: Everything in the World, will include the artist’s signature, intimately scaled 16” x 20” canvas compositions alongside several large-scale paintings that have not been publicly exhibited in decades and three painted wood sculptures. The show will be accompanied by a new catalogue produced by Pace Publishing, featuring a new essay by Martin Clark, director of the Camden Art Centre in London.

Over more than four decades, Nozkowski developed a singular approach to painting that rejected established aesthetic conventions. The artist, who died in 2019 at age 75, is known for his richly colored and textured abstractions inspired by his memories, everyday experiences, and encounters in the landscapes surrounding his longtime home in upstate New York. In this way, he developed a distinctive visual language of forms, symbols, and notations grounded in his own reality while defying obvious legibility. Constellations of biomorphic and geometric abstractions become worlds unto themselves, which Nozkowski forged as part of a lengthy and exacting process.

Pace’s upcoming exhibition of his work centers on a hugely formative period of the artist’s career during which he set out specific aesthetic terms for his practice. The show’s title, Everything in the World, brings the relationship between Nozkowski’s abstractions and his daily observations to the fore. Anything and everything in his environment—an object, a surface, a quality of light—could capture his curiosity and attention, becoming the source material for a painting.