Release
Fernberger Gallery is pleased to present Jumpin' at the Woodside, Nicole Wittenberg's debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles, featuring a selection of new works that envision the natural world through color, form, scale, and paint. This marks the inaugural presentation at the gallery's permanent location in Los Angeles, founded by Emma Fernberger.
When embarking on a new work, Wittenberg begins by creating pastel drawings and ink studies en plein aire, observing the surrounding wilderness, perceiving natural light, and constructing a new engagement with the real. In the studio, she then synthesizes her plein aire studies onto canvas.
The work in the studio becomes an immersive experience that strikes a new relationship to the landscape, which best equivocates the experience of being there right now.
Wittenberg's process could be compared to the tradition of the Les Nabis movement, a group of late nineteenth-century post-impressionist French painters whose members included Pierre Bennard and Edouard Vuillard. In her bold palette, there can be found an allegiance to how Pierre Bonnard one of Les Nabis' originators-described his own painting: "Colour has just as strong a logic as form. It's a matter of never giving up before one has managed to recreate the first impression."
The works in this exhibition reveal vivid skies and twilight seascapes, vistas made searingly bright with hot-toned underpainting that inform and reflect subsequent layers of paint. The landscapes convey a huge jolt of sensation that carries the experience of being there-bursts of orange and yellow reflecting off swaying trees, tall grasses, bending flowers, and rolling tides.
Named after Count Basie's 1938 classic swing song Jumpin' at the Woodside, Wittenberg's canvases capture the jazz melody's verve from the forest's edge-transporting the viewer outside the confines of illustration, fantasy, or idealization, liberating the artist and viewer to experience what is real, here, and now.
Nicole Wittenberg is an artist living and working in New York. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Journal Gallery, New York; Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami; Massimo De Carlo, London; and Acquavella Galleries, Palm Beach. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Amanita, New York; Acquavella Galleries, New York; Winter Street Gallery, Edgartown; Fernberger Gallery, Los Angeles; Jack Seibert Gallery, Los Angeles; Hill Foundation, New York, and Hunter Dunbar Projects, New York, among others. Wittenberg has taught at MICA, Baltimore, School of Visual Arts, New York, Ashbery Home School, Hudson, Bruce High Quality Foundation University, New York, and New York Studio School, New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Aishti Foundation, Beirut; The Albertina, Vienna; Boston Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others.
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Nicole Wittenberg
Nicole Wittenberg is an artist living and working in New York. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Journal Gallery, New York; Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami; Massimo De Carlo, London; and Acquavella Galleries, Palm Beach. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Amanita, New York; Acquavella Galleries, New York; Winter Street Gallery, Edgartown; Fernberger Gallery, Los Angeles; Jack Seibert Gallery, Los Angeles; Hill Foundation, New York, and Hunter Dunbar Projects, New York, among others. Wittenberg has taught at MICA, Baltimore, School of Visual Arts, New York, Ashbery Home School, Hudson, Bruce High Quality Foundation University, New York, and New York Studio School, New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Aishti Foundation, Beirut; The Albertina, Vienna; Boston Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others.
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