Ain't Misbehavin'
Nicole Wittenberg à la Maison La Roche
13 June — 19 July 2025
Ain’t Misbehavin presents a series of Nicole Wittenberg’s paintings that are developed from her preparatory plein air sketches in pastel. They relate the pleasures of the garden in bloom, but also the urge to record these temporal moments as impressions, since the works represent a phase of development that sits between the immediacy of painting in situ and the memory-work of refining the paintings in her studio. The process also speaks to a correlation between transience and profound presence. While not produced “in the field”, the works are painted with dynamic movement that delineates a psychic, affective space, and one that retains the energy of encounter. She aims to transmit elusive feelings, fleeting and transient moments, a universally common but impossible to describe sense of egoless connection to the natural world, and a sense of empathy for other forms of life.
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the gallery MASSIMODECARLO.
The works are vivid. Botanic figures torque, twist, and spin within the picture plane, pushing against edges of the canvas. In these works, especially, Wittenberg relates the painted surface to the surfaces oflocal elements-leaves, stems, petals, bark establishing a visual polyrhythm that speaks to her often-cited love for jazz music. Reminiscentof jazz, the works are syncopated; they express a deviating cadence. Jazz, a genre that is not easily defined, is constantly evolving, and that fleeting, temporal, changeable essence is imbued into Wittenberg’s work. Like jazz,Wittenberg’s canvases are not composed or predetermined, nor are they entirely improvised or impulsive: she follows a musical logic that allows for a degree of expressive freedom, and one that accentuates touch and feel.Like the movement of a voice around a sang-Billie Holiday’s, for example, whose voice travels the melody of her 1958 recording of Ain’t Misbehavin‘ with impeccable style-Wittenberg’s approach to painting invites different ways of seeing that exceed or are alternatives to empirical modes of observing-and being with-phenomena in nature.
Sarah Messerschmidt
Nicole Wittenberg. “Climbing Roses 2” (2024). Oil on canvas, 72" x 84".
Nicole Wittenberg
Nicole Wittenberg (born 1979) is an American artist based in New York City. She is a curator, professor, writer, and painter.
Wittenberg’s paintings reveal intimate, meditative scenes from her surrounding world. First exploring her chosensite through loose, pastel compositions rendered en plein air, Wittenberg captures the sensations ofher subject matter, then reimagines them on canvas, where a single composition often undergoes a series of transformations.
Wittenberg draws from the rich art historical traditions of painters who find inspiration in the natural world, employing precedents set by the Venetian school, Impressionists, Fauves, and American landscape painters, among others.
Wittenberg has developed series of paintings dedicated to the various natural scenes she has encountered, including the enigmatic landscapes of Maine, the apocalyptic sunsets during the height of California’s wildfires, and bodies of water like the Aegean and Caribbean Seas, and the Pacifie Ocean. Though her compositions are created from observation and life, Wittenberg privileges an emotional state, rendering her surroundings in brilliant colors and automatic, expressive mark making. The resulting creations are persona!, unmediated glimpses of universal vistas.
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 ofDrawing, Painting and Sculpture, andthe Bruce High Quality Foundation University and in 2017 she was a professor in the Critical Theory Department atthe School ofVisual 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 Arts, Boston, MA; Aishti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; and others.
Nicole Wittenberg © Joseph Stortwel, courtesy the artist.jpg