Adrian Nivola tackles a variety of themes in his imagery, working from memory and driven by an effort to convey an enduring quality of light in ephemeral scenes. Among his subjects are women and children as well as landscapes of England, southern France and Italy. A simultaneous engagement in multiple mediums and techniques suits Nivola who works extensively not only in oil paint and soft pastel but also with the sculptural materials of wire, wood and fabric. His artistic formation was encouraged at a young age by his grandfather, the Sardinian-born sculptor Costantino Nivola who was celebrated for his large-scale sandcast murals and also by his grandmother Ruth Guggenheim Nivola who created jewelry from silk and metal thread. The artist’s recent work was influenced by the legacy of the Nabis painters Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard as well as the landscape painter Albert Marquet. Nivola earned a master’s degree at the New York Studio School in 2008 after graduating with a BFA with distinction in painting from Yale.
Adrian Nivola | Early Life and Landscapes
Current exhibition
Maya Frodeman Gallery is pleased to present Early Life and Landscapes, a solo exhibition of oil paintings and pastels by artist Adrian Nivola. This exhibition, his third with Maya Frodeman Gallery, focuses on two themes: Nivola’s experience of having a child, and his travel through regions of France and Italy.
Since the birth of his son two years ago, Nivola has been captivated by observing the child’s emerging consciousness, and by moments of unlikely serenity in early, sleepless family life: “My child, like all infants, suddenly and mysteriously evolved from a vaguely alert amoeba into a forceful personality, the way a work of art, with any luck, sometimes can. When I look at my son, I am moved above all by the fragility of his trust in me which is, of course, a universal experience for all parents. It seems to me that if I can succeed in capturing something of that expression in him, which has so elevated the stakes of life for me, it might do the same for my audience.”
In his landscapes, the close proximity of Nivola’s subjects shifts to a more distant perspective. Here, the artist invites the viewer into expansive open skies, remote from the confines of domesticity. “As soon as I became a father,” he reflects, “I felt driven to explore two paths in my work and two correspondingly different points of view; one up close, the other from afar. I was fascinated by closely observing family life and at the same time, longed for contact with natural settings, especially the land and warm light in parts of southern Europe.”
Nivola’s work is emphatically small in format yet often monumental in scale. The small format suits his touch with the material of both paint and pastel. It also necessitates close contact with his subjects, rather than requiring the viewer to stand at a distance in order to perceive the whole composition. Nivola works from memory, assisted by drawings and photographs rather than directly from nature. He believes that the process of recollecting his experience helps him to distill what matters visually and emotionally.
“It is hopefully as surprising to my viewers as it is to me that with powdered dust, I have been able to generate light.” This effect is hard won through reworking and layering in Nivola’s preferred mediums of soft pastel and oil paint. “The pastels allow me to embrace an experimental process where I can at any point introduce radical changes to a composition because the pigment is less prone to muddying. I find oil paint less forgiving but also more inherently rich and luminous.”
