Nicole Wittenberg
Nicole Wittenberg is committed to making “lifelike” paintings and drawings that evoke an immersive feeling of a singular moment. Impassioned and awkward bodies caught mid-sex are lovingly and lusciously rendered in her paintings based on amateur porn videos. Eager spring trees in Maine glow with neon-chartreuse leaves and so much personality they feel like portraits. She captures afternoon sunlight reflecting off undulating waves in the Aegean Sea or the Savannah Sound through evocative marks in dry pastel. The chalky pigments contain a unique chromatic intensity that is difficult to capture in other media—colors seem to emanate their hues from some internal energy source. “They’re about sensation—the feeling of people, places, and things. I wanted to record them really quickly and in high chroma,” explains Wittenberg. This emotive quality of the drawings carries into her oil paintings, but they require a different approach. Because oil paints are relatively transparent compared to pastels, Wittenberg experimented with adding various opaque grounds to the paintings until she achieved the desired luminosity. The technique produces canvases that glow as though they are charged with the scene’s light. Though Wittenberg has recently focused on landscapes and portraits in nature, her practice has always aligned with a sensual familiarity with life. While in school at San Francisco Art Institute, she began making drawings from slow-motion videos, life models, and photographs. In 2014, that interest in photographic and pop-culture references extended to pornography, and inspired Wittenberg to begin painting from amateur porn. Curator and painter David Salle praised her commitment to reinventing realism with more brute force than her predecessors or contemporaries. "People think everything's been done, but that's not true." "[Wittenberg] dares herself to do precisely that which scares her. "
Wittenberg further sets herself apart from the history of nude painting by depicting sexually aroused men instead of the conventional objectified female form...sexualized men are underrepresented, almost taboo in art history. When discussing her observation-based work, Wittenberg says that “the biggest challenge is to trust what I see, even when it conflicts with what I think I see... Often, reality contrasts to how I think things should look.” This dedication to trusting her eyes—even when they tell her that the backlit spring leaves need an acidic yellow to bring out their natural vibrance, or when a sunset calls for neon pink to brighten the layers of translucent oil paint—reveals the extravagant beauty of the world. She currently lives and works in Chinatown in New York City. Works by this artist can be seen at:
Work
She is a curator, professor, writer, and painter.