OPENING RECEPTION 1ST THURSDAY, JANUARY 7, FROM 5 – 8PM
Sullivan Goss – An American Gallery presents a landmark exhibition for Nicole Strasburg – an exhibition of 50 works celebrating her 50th birthday. To commemorate this milestone in the artist’s career, the gallery has produced a catalog featuring documentation on Nicole Strasburg’s past six solo shows with the gallery as well as the work from her newest exhibition.
Ten years ago, the gallery had an exhibition called 40+40@40 for Nicole celebrating her 40th birthday with 40 works on paper and 40 paintings. A decade later, it seemed fitting to mount 50/50. While the title nods to the artist’s birthday, it also references Nicole’s affinity for painting the mountains and the sea in equal measure. Ten years ago, Nicole’s work concentrated on the ocean. Today, she tries to split her time between the two environments. This exhibition will feature a 50/50 combination of paintings of both.
Nicole gravitates towards the quiet spaces, the remote scenes; the Santa Barbara Channel islands, an empty beach in any season, a nature preserve in the backcountry; these are the places she seeks out and brings back to us as paintings on paper and on her signature birch wood panels. The environments that Nicole records can also be seen as an interplay between nature’s abstract shapes and her surface of frenetic brush marks. Dynamic compositions of pared down forms give her work its contemporary look.
As with Nicole’s past exhibitions, the artist has created one of her characteristic grids of 12” x 12” paintings. Within one square foot, she is able to get up close and personal with pine trees and pathways of snow, but can also stretch out to to take in island views, mountain ridgelines, the ocean, and clouds in all their forms. Collectors often end up buying three or more to create a Strasburg grid of their own at home.
Nicole Strasburg received a bachelor’s degree in fine art from UCSB and is the recipient of numerous art awards both in painting and in print making. A select group of her work is a popular seasonal sales item in the Sundance catalog. Additionally, Nicole has a thriving enterprise in rubber stamps, which she makes available in her online Etsy shop Two Dog STAMPede.
