Nicholas Krushenick

The artist Nicholas Krushenick was a forerunner in the Pop art movement whose paintings created their own distinct subgenre of Pop abstraction. While his contemporaries, like Warhol and Lichtenstein, were focused on figurative, mass media-related images, Krushenick did the opposite, exploring a territory of his own. Utilizing basic graphic signs and patterns from Western pop culture and Japanese woodcuts, Krushenick created a unique signature style of black-outlined abstract forms atop areas of flat primary colors. In paintings like Pumpkin (1998) and Crossover (1972), a plethora of black lines function simultaneously as border, texture, and shade, matched with highlighter-like colors of yellow, pink, orange, and blue. Krushenick's paintings, though largely underappreciated in his lifetime, came to influence many painters, including Tom Nazkowski, Peter Halley, and Mary Heilmann.

Krushenick's work is held in the permanent collections of many museums and institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Chrysler Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the San Francisco Art Museum, among others.