Patricia Nix

Throughout her distinguished career, Patricia Nix has positioned herself as a keen protagonist in the development of late 20th century painting and sculpture. Her membership in the esteemed National Academy of Design defines her as one of the most highly respected oil painters in America. Nix’s work is displayed throughout the world in prestigious public, corporate and university collections, including the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art and numerous other national museums. It has been reviewed by the major art publications and critics of the day and used as cover art on multiple books, journals, and other publications, including Reader’s Digest. But perhaps the most important endorsement of Patricia Nix comes from the many hundreds of discriminating private collectors around the world who have acquired her work, some paying amounts exceeding $100,000 to make an original Nix part of their everyday lives. We are delighted that our series of limited editions prints makes it affordable for a much wider audience to own this beautiful work.

Although she has long resided in New York City and France, Nix is a native Texan and her earliest influences came from the culture of Texas: deep religious faith, southwestern churches, Mexican icons, and Native American crafts. Her work embraces art history and draws on the major stylistic movements of our time, including cubism and surrealism. She has been hailed by critics as the successor to such disparate artists as Georgia O’Keefe and Joseph Cornell, and has exhibited with other contemporary masters including David Hockney, Willem De Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Louise Nevelson, Julian Schnabel, and Jim Dine. But despite these culture-specific influences and comparisons, Nix’s work is powerful on a universal level and quite unique in the world of art. Indeed, the term “American Baroque” has been coined to describe her work.

Upon seeing a Nix painting, one is first captivated by the lush, vibrant beauty of her colors and imagery. But while opulently beautiful, Nix’s work possesses a rigor that rejects sentimentality.

As with all art that is true and lasting, Nix’s challenges the viewer to respond. She seeks both to entertain and to evoke a personal, emotional response. Nix describes her own work as a careful balance between accident and discipline-a continuous dialogue between my conscious mind and the unconscious. I court accident in order to let the unconscious do most of the talking. The best paintings often happen quite magically with very little conscious effort. It’s an intuitive process, guided by years of experience, in which on thing simply leads to another.

An only child growing up in an isolated environment, Nix set about at an early age to inoculate herself from loneliness by creating in her own mind a secret world of beauty, mystery, and magic. She was creating art by the age of three, and did her first oil painting at age eleven-appropriately, a painting of a rose. Over the years she developed an unsurpassed level of technical mastery of the traditional methods of painting. This mastery, along with her rare creative gifts and her compulsive urge to explore, combine to create a uniquely rich visual result -a magical reality.

Through her internationally successful program of limited edition prints, Nix has quickly become one of the most “collectible” artists in the contemporary market. This series of limited editions offers a broad sampling of Nix’s widely ranging imagery, from her exquisite floral studies, to her figurative painting, to her ground-breaking “trellises.” We invite you to indulge in a visual feast - discover for yourself the magical world of Patricia Nix.

For more from this artist, contact us.

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