Nicole Wittenberg’s first solo museum exhibition opens April 18 at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art

The Ogunquit Museum of American Art (OMMA) is pleased to present the first solo museum exhibition of painter Nicole Wittenberg. Featuring recent works on canvas and a series of pastel drawings, “Nicole Wittenberg: A Sailboat in the Moonlight” explores the deep history of landscape painting within the region, as well as the artist’s profound connection to the natural environment of Maine. The exhibition is on view April 18 through July 20 in OMAA’s special exhibition galleries.

Wittenberg’s works are expressively rich. In a textural play of color and movement, they convey her affective relationship to the natural world, as well as nature’s evanescent traits. Through sensation and perception, she renders the feeling of subtle forces: a torrent of water, the curve of a leaf, the glare of afternoon light on the bark of a tree. While Wittenberg captures the physical reality of Maine’s coastal forests, wetlands and meadows, she more closely works with light, with the transit of the sun through the sky, as well as her own positioning within this dense and verdant landscape.

Characteristic of the artist’s established style, an artistic lineage is also visible throughout her body of work. Wittenberg engages with the canon of painting history, chiefly drawing on examples of European expressionism and modernist abstraction in order to more deeply explore her visceral relationship to the maritime environment. Her brushwork and pastel markings are loose and evocative, and there is an allusion to a metaphysical way of seeing or knowing that extends beyond empirical reality. This experience of land is close and sensitive, with a special focus on meadow flowers as enigmatic and enchanting forms. Wittenberg is less concerned with describing a reality as she is with providing a medium through which to sense.

“A Sailboat in the Moonlight” borrows its title from the 1937 song by Billie Holiday. Like jazz music, these works are in constant motion, communicating feeling and place without pinning either one down. Colors, luminescence and shadow are juxtaposed generously by the artist’s hand in a supple layering of pigment. There is a soulful, syncopated freedom to Wittenberg’s painterly gestures, reminiscent of a smooth drift of musical notes, that both anchors her audience in a place and time, while maintaining an observational openness.

“Nicole Wittenberg: A Sailboat in the Moonlight” is curated by Devon Zimmerman, OMAA’s curator of modern and contemporary art. The exhibition at OMAA is presented in concert with “Nicole Wittenberg: Cheek to Cheek” at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland (May 24 to Sept. 14) and “Ain’t Misbehavin’” at Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, France (opening June 12). The three concurrent exhibitions are also marked by the publication of Wittenberg’s first career-spanning monograph by Monacelli Press, with texts by Suzanne Hudson, David Salle, Devon Zimmerman and an interview by Jarrett Earnest.

Wittenberg was born in San Francisco, California, 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 2011-14 she served as a teacher at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, and the 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.

Wittenberg’s works are in prominent collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Albertina, Vienna; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Aishti Foundation, Beirut; and others. She has enjoyed recent solo exhibitions at Massimo de Carlo, Milan (2024); Fernberger Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); Journal Gallery, New York (2023); Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami (2023); and Acquavella Galleries, Palm Beach (2022). She is based in New York and Maine.

The Ogunquit Museum of American Art is at 543 Shore Road, Ogunquit. Opened in 1953, OMAA was founded by the artist Henry Strater. The museum shares close historic and geographic ties to one of the earliest modern arts communities in the United States. OMAA houses a permanent collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints and photographs from the late 1800s to the present. The museum showcases American art by mounting modern and contemporary exhibitions and accompanying educational programming and events. For more information, visit www.ogunquitmuseum.org.