Nickson’s interests lie in the individual’s place in a world shaped by immensities of land and water, sky and cloud.

“I think the making of a work of art is about breathing. Drawing is inhaling while painting is exhaling.”

Now on display at The Painting Center, the group exhibition titled “The Body in Question,” a phrase cheekily resonant of a coroner’s report, explores the body as a vessel for communicating experience through painting. Curators Ophir Agassi and Karen Wilkin have adroitly presented a diverse group of ten distinguished contemporary painters connected by their focus on the human figure. Collectively they cover a wide spectrum between clarity and ambiguity. But each piece tells a story with a figure that is living a life that the viewer can glimpse and share. Consequently, the show embraces and encourages empathy.

Graham Nickson: Eye Level

By: Karen Wilkin

"The initial surprise of seeing a group of single heads by Nickson notwithstanding, the directness and material forthrightness of the recent portraits may have been their most striking quality."

THE BIG NEWS LAST SEASON WAS THE OPENING OF THE WHITNEY’S new home on Gansevoort Street, near the Hudson River, designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. But there were also other attractions: sculpture exhibitions—abstract and figurative, current and historical— in the U.S. and Europe, as well as an equally wide-ranging, less geographically dispersed group of painting shows. The sculpture exhibits ranged from Vincent Barré’s recent works in France, to Robert Taplin’s witty narratives in Philadelphia, to Anthony Caro’s steel constructions from the 1960s in Los Angeles; the painting exhibits included abstractions by Thomas Nozkowski, Atta Kwami, and Larry Poons, landscapes by Julian Hatton and Graham Nickson, and an engaging, odd-ball installation by Summer Wheat, all in New York. First: the Whitney. The consensus is that Piano got it right. The entrance to the museum, both from the street and inside the generous lobby—or as Piano calls it, “the piazza”—is welcoming, the relation to the High Line is appealing, and the way the building responds to the once gritty neighborhood without calling too much attention to itself is a welcome change from most of what has been erected nearby. The old buildings of the former Meatpacking District, with their deep canopies, still dominate as we approach, testimony to the neighborhood’s recent past, even though the shop fronts are now full of chic clothing instead of sides of beef.

Over forty years ago, the moment Graham Nickson arrived in Italy to paint as a recipient of the Rome Prize, his car was burglarized of his supplies and preparatory work. With nothing to go on, he climbed on to the roof of the American Academy and began to paint the sunset. Nickson has been painting this way ever since, daring to capture nature’s chroma in watercolor and oil. Now for his first exhibition at Betty Cuningham Gallery, recently relocated from Chelsea to the Lower East Side, twenty-four watercolors of his “experience of coming dawn or falling dusk” are matched with a single, monumental oil on canvas, nine by twelve feet, called Tree of Birds (2014).4 In this latest large work depicting a mountain in Australia, rain clouds blot out the sun. The weather presses down. Birds gather and flap around a tree. As I wrote in 2011, Nickson is “heir apparent to the early American modernists Charles Burchfield and Arthur Dove, with synesthetic work that manages to both radiate and rumble.” This latest painting shows nature guiding his brush with an increasing animistic force. For a painter of the sun, Nickson’s greatest power may be in the shadows.

As a 26-year-old Rome Prize recipient in 1972, Graham Nickson was already so convinced of painting’s transcendent power that he began testing his own painterly mettle with a hazardous subject: sunsets. If to the art world painting itself was marginal, sunset pictures were the epitome of trite irrelevance. For nearly 40 years since then, as the skies and landscapes in “Paths of the Sun” make clear, the New York-based British artist has stepped ever farther out on this limb, returning with increasingly eloquent work. The show juxtaposed 12 early small oils (1972–73) with 29 watercolors and three large canvases, all made from 1999 to 2011.

On Cape Cod there is a bay that faces directly into the setting sun during the summer months. When the tide is low one can count up to seventeen sandbars before seeing the water’s edge more than half of a mile off shore. It’s a mind-bogglingly seductive scene. As the sun sets, the water trapped in between the long thin bars begin to shimmer, glow and turn hot orange, red and magenta, ringed with opalescent greens and blues. The sand bars go from reddish dirty blond to deep eggplant. The shore is lined with a cast of locals and tourists, many sitting on the dunes or posing for snapshots. When the last bit of the sun dips below the horizon, a din of clapping and whoo-hooing is heard followed shortly by the irregular hum of engines starting up to take the spectators home.