Joan Nelson

In her paintings, Joan Nelson recontextualizes parts and scenes from historic landscape paintings with first person observations, memories and invention. Appropriating from artists such as Albrecht Altdorfer, Albert Bierstadt, Edward Hicks and Caspar David Friedrich, Nelson speaks to the experience of nature and the complexity of its representation across time and place. Nelson’s majestic landscapes do not depict actual, specific places, but rather are an amalgamation of experience and image.Her luminous and haunting works of art occupy a unique place in the history of landscape painting, one that is distinctly female and revisionist.

She has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston,  St. Louis Arts Museum, The Nave Museum in Victoria, and Freedman Gallery at Albright College in Reading. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Triple Candie in New York, Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Witte de With in Rotterdam, Leubsdorf Art Gallery at Hunter College in New York, The Miyagi Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, among many others.

Courtesy of Adams and Ollman