Dona Nelson

April 24 - May 31, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 24, from 6 - 8:30pm

In this survey exhibition of paintings by Dona Nelson, Thomas Erben Gallery revisits and reconsiders the motivations of an artist widely regarded as one of the most vital, intellectually considered, agressively tactile and physically inventive American painters of her generation. This is Nelsons's second exhibition with the gallery following her critically acclaimed solo, Brain Stain, in 2006.

The trajectory of Nelson's artistic development is as multi-faceted as it is focused. A true 'painter', her insistance on the primacy of this art form goes hand in hand with her refusal to slow her exploration of the medium's potential by resting upon a single style or form.

In small-scaled, minimal works from 1973, we see already inclinations in Nelson's work to what is self-described as the 'surreal-real'. In particular No Title, 1976 (reproduced in Heresies, illustrating Nelson's 1977 essay, "Growing up a Painter"), unveils the tension between abstraction and figuration which remains a productive source for the artist to the current day. Doretta, 1983, the only portrait on view, is perhaps the most deceptive, being an evokation of cubism with its concern for two-dimensional space while reimbuing the female figure with a sense of presence and identity

As Brooks Adams wrote in 2003 on the exhibited Pennsylvannia Nativity, 2001:

Nelson uses a humble if more emotionally remote source; a faded color postcard reproduction of an anonymous folk-art rendition of that holiday-season perennial. Here a pale, almost marmoreal appearance of the cheese-cloth construction, inflected by graphite shading and acrylic medium in-fill, greatly amplify the postcard's wan, second hand image of what appears to a Greek Revival temple and the figures of the Three Wise Men, somehow seeming to bring us closer to some original devotion.