Acquavella Galleries is pleased to present All the Way, Nicole Wittenberg’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and her first at Acquavella’s New York location. The exhibition will be on view from October 16 through December 5, 2025. A reception for the artist will be held the evening of Wednesday, October 29, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. Wittenberg’s return to Acquavella this fall follows the artist’s three solo museum exhibitions over this summer: Maison La Roche, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris; the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, Maine; and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine. Several works from Wittenberg’s museum exhibitions in Rockland and Ogunquit will appear in All the Way.

All the Way explores painting’s ability to capture the sensation of a singular moment extended over time. Nicole Wittenberg's painting practice takes scenes, elements, and encounters with the natural world as its subject matter. Her landscapes and twisting florals explore the medium’s ability to capture temporal moments as impressions that retain the energy of the experience.

The paintings in this exhibition give the viewer the somatic sensation of immersion—to be in a world within the painting. In this respect, Wittenberg draws on the work of Paul Cézanne and the Post-Impressionists, as well as the Fauvist challenge to traditional color. For Wittenberg “white is not as bright as yellow or certain shades of orange or even certain shades of green or pink. They’re brighter than white. I wanted light that was just as intense as daylight to replicate the sensation of actual light and actually being there.”

Wittenberg’s process often begins with pastel drawings, small oil paintings and ink studies, which display an economy of gesture and an expert handling of the relationship between light and color. Both her drawings and her paintings show a resistance to perspective and a tension with figuration.

Art historian Suzanne Hudson connects Wittenberg's approach to the work of Venetian colorists, such as Veronese: “Sometimes the grounds are exposed more fully, and at others, outline other forms in residual slivers of crackling intensity, further elaborating color ranges and relations.”

About Nicole Wittenberg (b. 1979)

Nicole Wittenberg is an artist, curator, professor, and writer who was born in San Francisco and is currently based in New York City. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003.

In 2012, Wittenberg received the coveted John Koch Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters to a young artist making figurative work. From 2011 to 2014, she served as a teacher at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and in 2017, she was a professor in the Critical Theory department at the School of Visual Arts.

Wittenberg’s works are included in prominent collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Albertina, Vienna; the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut.

The artist’s first comprehensive monograph was published this summer by Monacelli Press, coinciding with her recent solo exhibitions in Maine and France.