Tom Nozkowski

Though his small, brightly colored oil paintings are highly abstract, Thomas Nozkowski insists that they are all rooted in the real world: "I think you can actually make a picture out of anything, a state of mind, an idea, anything." A student of the Abstract Expressionists, Nozkowski does not begin a painting with a final image in mind, but creates his works intuitively, noting that he knows a painting is finished when he feels an "energized space" in the canvas. Refusing to discard or abandon a painting once he has started it, Nozkowski's works often take years to complete in spite of their small size, with the artist reworking the same canvas multiple times.

In addition to a 2009 retrospective of his work at the National Gallery of Canada, Nozkowski has been the subject of over 70 solo shows, at venues including the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1997), the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz, Germany (2007), and the Fisher Landau Center (2008).