from the Toronto Globe and Mail
Do you see what I see? No? Good
By Sarah Milroy
The pleasures Thomas Nozkowski’s paintings afford are simple, but far from simplistic
If the American artist Thomas Nozkowski had a theme song, it would probably be Forever Young . Walking through his current retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada – his biggest exhibition to date, curated by NGC director Marc Mayer – one can’t help but be swept up in the buoyancy of Nozkowski’s vision, moments of lived experience that he has run through the mill of his imagination and reconstituted on canvas with remarkably consistent effect over the course of his more than 30-year career. It’s not possible to talk of a signature style when it comes to Nozkowski, a painter’s painter who has long been a sleeper in the New York art world; each painting seems like a completely distinct imaginative universe, with its own optical characteristics. But Nozowski does have a signature mood: rambunctious, optimistic, just plain friendly.
In this, he expresses a quintessential Americanness.