Curated by Anne Harris

Janice Nowinski, Reclining Nude, Back View, 2018, oil on board, 8” x 10” — Janice Nowinski, *Reclining Nude, Back View,* 2018, oil on board, 8” x 10”

Artist's Reception/Gallery Talk: Saturday, September 28, 2 - 5pm
Gallery Talk with Janice Nowinski and Kyle Staver, moderated by Anne Harris at 3pm

The RAC is pleased to present Brooklyn-based painter Janice Nowinski’s solo exhibition Bodies of Paint. This is the artist’s first exhibition in the Chicago area. We’ll be exhibiting nineteen paintings. The earliest is from 2009, but most were made in the last four years.

Janice Nowinski spends months, sometimes years, working on small figurative paintings. Her subjects are suspended between flesh and paint. They barely cohere—one slip, and they’re just a smear. The paintings are felt into place to find a just-so balance of opposites: blunt, tender, awkward, graceful, remote, intimate and exposed. This is the result of perfect pitch painting—the subtlest color, the most nuanced edges, figure/ground finesse, and again, that tightly stretched line between paint and its transformation into light, air, space, weight and flesh.

Nowinski is now associated with current trends in contemporary figuration—painterly allegorical inventions that channel art history and politics. However, that connection is happenstance. Her work today actually reflects 40 years of slow maturation. She is sincerely old-school, part of a tribe of painters who build on tradition and share faith that tenacity and dissatisfaction will lead to originality. Her inspirations are numerous but obviously include Rembrandt, Cezanne and Soutine. She’s in conversation with leading contemporary figurative artists but also stands alone. Her work’s intimacy, subtlety, slowness and deliberate lack of grandeur sets it apart. Leon Kossoff comes to mind. She’s a painter’s painter.

“Painting is damn difficult—you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.” –Paul Cezanne

–Anne Harris

Link to Janice Nowinski’s Bodies of Paint exhibition catalogue essay by Anne Harris.

Janice Nowinski, Pink Bathing Suit VI, 2019, oil on board, 7” x 5” — Janice Nowinski, *Pink Bathing Suit VI,* 2019, oil on board, 7” x 5”

Janice Nowinski lives and paints in Brooklyn, NY. She studied painting at the Art Students League and the New York Studio School and then received her MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art. Her work has been exhibited at venues ranging from the American Academy of Arts and Letters National Academy Museum (NYC) to the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center (Washington D.C.), to John Davis Gallery (Hudson, NY), Zurcher Gallery (NYC), Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects (NYC), and Kent Fine Arts (NYC). She is the recipient of a purchase prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been featured and reviewed in such publications as the New Criterion, Hyperallergic and Huffington Post. She is represented by the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York.