Nicola Tyson

The figurative painter Nicola Tyson imagines the human body in bright swathes of color, rendered as bulbous and near-abstracted biomorphic forms. “I’m a figurative painter, in that I invent, contort and use a figure—mostly the human figure—in my work,” Tyson told Eye See Hue magazine. “I represent urgent bodies (bodies of the mind, bodies with minds) but entities that can only exist within the flatness of two dimensions.” She cites Cindy Sherman and Francis Bacon as influences on her work, which, like that of these artists, deals with bodily transformations and a grotesquely charged ideal of beauty. Tyson, in addition to painting, creates sculptures and drawings that follow this theme, their sensual lines tilting the work away from pure abstraction and into the realm of bodily forms.

Tyson was born in London in 1960 and studied at the Chelsea School of Art and the St. Martins School of Art in London. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, among many others. She has exhibited solo shows throughout the U.S., England, Canada, and Brazil.