Thomas Nozkowski (b. 1944, Teaneck, New Jersey; d. 2019, New York) was recognized for his richly colored and intimately scaled abstract paintings and drawings that push the limits of visual language. Nozkowski graduated from Cooper Union in 1967, where he studied with Robert Gwathmey and Bauhaus-trained Hannes Beckmann. During the mid-1970s, two important decisions guided his work: he resolved to paint from personal experience and chose to work on a small scale. By 1974, he embraced easel painting, working on 16-by-20-inch prepared canvas boards, distinguishing his practice from the heroic scale and bravado of his Abstract Expressionist predecessors. He soon found that a smaller format enacted a formal freedom in his process-oriented practice that had otherwise been exhausted with large surfaces.

Works by Nozkowski have been featured in over 300 group exhibitions, including Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind – Art in the Present Tense, curated by Robert Storr at the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007), as well as group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012), Royal Academy of Arts, London (2012), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2016), Kingsborough Art Museum, Brooklyn (2017), and University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington (2017). He has been the subject of over eighty solo exhibitions, including Subject to Change at the Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany (2007); Paintings, a survey at Fisher Landau Center, Long Island City, New York (2008); a retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2009); Touchstones at University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington (2017); and Paintings at Art Omi, Ghent, New York (2018), among others. He held the position of Professor of Fine Art, and later as Visiting Professor Emeritus, at the Mason Gross School of the Arts of Rutgers University, New Jersey, from 2000 to 2018.
 

Nozkowski’s works are held in over forty public collections throughout the United States and abroad, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Dallas Museum of Art; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; FRAC Centre, Orleans, France; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, among others. The artist’s estate is represented by Pace Gallery.