George Nick : New Paintings

March 30 - April 28 at Gallery NAGA

In his 2004 essay on the painting of George Nick, John Stomberg, the Deputy Director of the Williams College Museum of Art, coined the term “existential realism” to describe the particular arena in which Nick operates.  Yes, he is a realist, a painter in love with the world and its appearances, and, yes, he is, like the first generation abstract expressionists who were his peers in the 1950s, a painter whose work is a document of his moment-by-moment encounter with the art of painting.

The Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, Massachusetts has organized George Nick: Spirit of Place a selection of works painted in Europe and featuring paintings executed by Nick in Rome in 2005.  This show is up through May 20.

In tandem with this exhibition, Gallery NAGA mounts George Nick: New Paintings from March 30 through April 28, presenting all manner of George’s current subjects – complex exteriors, fascinating machines (airplanes, autos, a steam tractor), brilliantly lit interiors, and intimate objects.  A reception for the artist and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, March 30 from 6 to 8 pm.  In addition, Nick offers a public talk on his work on Saturday, April 7 at 2 pm.

Accompanying both shows is a 28-page catalog reproducing many of the paintings in each.  The catalog also publishes prose written for the occasion, including a foreword by John Updike and an essay by the director of the Danforth Museum of Art, Katherine French.

In his foreword Updike remarks, “In his most recent work, my impression is, he steps back from the virtuosic looseness and dash of the premier coup method into something like the precision with which he was portraying middle-class houses, solidly carved by sun and shadow, thirty years ago.  New paintings of sun-splashed domestic interiors, of Back Bay perspectives, of an antique tractor in snow and a retired fighter plane in a blue-tinted hangar all give us a third dimension soaked in light and a truthfulness so simultaneously blunt and intricate that we marvel.  At seventy-nine, George paints like a young man just discovering the appearances of things, discoveries that have nothing to do with the ego of the artist but everything to do with the world’s constant overflow of color and form.”

Nick’s work has been exhibited and collected by many major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.