PALM BEACH, FLOR.- Acquavella Galleries is presenting its first solo exhibition of works by New York-based artist Nicole Wittenberg. Titled Our Love is Here to Stay, the exhibition features 22 new works on canvas and paper. The show has been on view since December 2, 2022 and will continue through January 2, 2023 at Acquavella’s Palm Beach location.

During the pandemic, Wittenberg spent over a year in mid-coast Maine, recording what she saw and experienced in plein air pastel studies. Rendering the world in brilliant colors and free expressive marks, Wittenberg’s scenes from nature are deeply personal and meditative. The loose pastel compositions capture the sensations of the landscape. Back in her studio in New York, Wittenberg reimagines the scenes rehearsed in the sketches on large canvases, where a single composition often undergoes a series of transformations.

Wittenberg states: “I strive to capture the sensorial emotions of particular moments and experiences in nature–chasing the feeling of being there. Less about naturalism, what I find interesting is the translation of a lived experience and sensation into an image so I can return to that moment every time I make and see a painting.”

The artist’s use of color aids in this pursuit: the high chroma oranges and pinks that fill her canvases almost mimic warm light seen through closed eyes. Though her artworks are created from observation and life, the artist pulls away from the constraints of naturalism. As Reilly Davidson states in an essay for the exhibition’s catalogue, “Wittenberg avoids naturalism by communicating the revelatory interactions between person and world… [her] ambitions can be linked to this interest in having felt experience realized in paint.”

In her landscapes, Wittenberg builds off a rich artistic tradition of American painters who have found inspiration in Maine’s natural beauty, including Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Marsden Hartley, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd and more recently, Katherine Bradford, Ann Craven, and Reggie Burrows Hodges.

In Sunset 21 (2022), the artist depicts a vibrant sunset over a pond in Maine where a glowing orange sun, bathed in pink and purple light, sets beyond dark evergreen mountains. Wittenberg paints the strange hues created by the haze and smoke from the devastating wildfires in California during the summer of 2021.
Here the artist’s impulse to experience and record the natural world can also be seen as an act to document and protect a dying planet, a cause the artist is passionate about.

On behalf of the artist's studio and this exhibition, Wittenberg and Acquavella Galleries will donate all proceeds from the sale of Sunset 21 to Art to Acres, a non-profit that engages art to support large-scale land conservation. The founder of the initiative, Haley Mellin, says, "Nicole Wittenberg’s work is a considered commitment to the natural world. She draws and paints from nature, and looks to learn from the legacy of landscapes and waterscapes."

The exhibition will be accompanied by a hardcover catalogue featuring an essay by Reilly Davidson.

Nicole Wittenberg (born 1979) is an American Artist based in New York City. She is a curator, professor, writer, and painter. Wittenberg was born in San Francisco, CA, and received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003. She received the American Academy of Arts and Letters coveted John Koch Award for Best Young Figurative Painter in 2012. From 2011–2014 she served as a teacher at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, and Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and in 2017 she was a professor in the Critical Theory Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Wittenberg’s works are included in many prominent collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Albertina, Vienna, Austria; the Boston Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA; and others. Exhibitions include The Female Gaze, Part Two: Women Look at Men at Cheim & Read Gallery, New York, NY; Painter’s Painters: Gifts from Alex Katz, High Museum of Art Atlanta, GA; and In Her Hands, Skarstedt Gallery, New York, NY.