“Her obsession is painting and its antecedents, which means circumventing the hazards of knowing too much. “You can’t undo your teaching,” Nowinski said during a studio visit. No, but you can endeavor to effect a new lexicon from the old, which is what she does. Grace is not arrived at through verisimilitude—rather, it’s the presence of alterity that will tell all the truth but tell it slant (to borrow from Emily Dickinson). Nowinski’s figures may be familiar, yet with a bit of

strangeness… they unnerve and deflect.”

 

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Janice Nowinski (b. 1959, Manhattan) is a Brooklyn based artist, who received her MFA in painting from Yale University in 1987. Over the years, she has developed a painting practice, which is simultaneously informed as well as irreverently idiosyncratic. Though much admired by her peers and exhibiting in the New York area, it was Nowinski’s 2021 exhibition with Thomas Erben, which represented a breakthrough – garnering multiple reviews including in Artforum, Hyperallergic and Two Coats of Paint – and much wider recognition. Since then, the artist has been deepening her engagement with color and painting as a concept, medium and form, leading to inclusions in shows at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Venus over Manhattan, DC Moore (all New York), Joe Bradley and Valentina Akerman’s Galerie Sardine (Amagansett), and Eleni Koroneou Gallery (Athens, forthcoming).