Dona Nelson

Nelson's early art explored geometric, grid-based abstraction through intuitive and systematic modes of pictorial construction; reviewers noted it for its grasp of style,[25] subtle color, and affinities with art by Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly.[11][19] Considering this work developmental, she eventually destroyed it. In the 1980s, Nelson shifted to painterly representational work (e.g., Daily News, 1983) featuring ordinary interiors, landscapes and cityscapes, portrayed with an emotional realism and unfussy physicality.[33][34][35] Figurative paintings, such as Summer Man (1983),[36] offered centralized, life-size everyday subjects that The New York Times wrote, display a plain-spoken, "satisfying solidity" like those of Philip Guston; later works, such as California Landscape or the Man Who Needs Everything (1988),[37] presaged future directions with glued, clothing-like pieces of muslin, saturated color, and increasing abstraction.[38][34]

Many critics (and Nelson herself) consider her mature work to have begun after a long period of development, when she returned to abstraction in the 1990s.[34][39] In this period, she regularly incorporated unconventional materials such as cheesecloth, muslin, gels, and modeling paste.[40][41] She also began employing unorthodox techniques that combined control and accident to "disrupt" her paintings, such as pouring latex enamel paint over gridded fields (the "12 Stations of the Subway" series, 1997–8), making charcoal rubbings of highly textured, existing paintings (her ghostly "Rubbings," 2002),[42] or adhering wadded, paint-soaked muslin to canvasses.[43][44][30] Reviewers commented on the new work's collision of "formal order and procedural chaos,"[13] and raw and finished, which they found both dislocating and inviting, its power deriving from a "freeze-framing" of the painting process that revealed a series of discrete, nonlinear acts and decisions.[30][43][45] Describing this passage in Nelson's work through the painting Octopus Blue (1990), Klaus Kertess wrote, "We are confronted by an organism wrestling with its self-formation—complex, mysterious, fierce, playful, sensual."[1]

Dona Nelson, String Turn (two-sided, front shown), Acrylic, acrylic mediums, cheesecloth and string on canvas, 90" x 60", 2015.

In 2002, Nelson began creating two-sided works one writer called a "nervy push" of "painterly painting into the realm of sculpture."[5][22] Critics noted works like Gaucho Groucho (2005), String Turn (2015) and Coins in a Fountain (2015) for their increasing inventiveness and sense of performance,[46][6] "adamant, difficult beauty" and "elaborate narratives of process,"[4] which included punching holes through the canvas and working back and forth between sides, staining through sides, removing and re-stretching canvasses, and more.[7][2] David Pagel argues that this work "builds memory into the process, creating experiences that are greater than the sum of their parts – and far more mysterious."[6] The New York Times wrote, "The paintings... demand that you deal with how they came to be that way… mysteries mount, resolve and mount again."[27] Nelson explains that her exhibition constructions—using steel stands, platforms, bricks and cable—seek a more conscious, intimate viewing process countering the artificiality of typical, "big white box-style" contemporary art spaces, which privilege the reification of art over engagement and the complexity of surface.[47][48]

Dona Nelson, "Models Stand Close to the Paintings" show (Installation view, "Box" constructions), Collage, dyed cheesecloth, muslin, and acrylic mediums on linen panel mounted on plywood base, 2017.

In 2016, Nelson returned to the figure in her two-sided, variously constructed "Box" works[49]—free-standing, door-sized painted panels that verge on architecture and continue to employ unconventional materials and processes.[4][22] Critics describe installations of the work, such as her 2017 show "Models Stand Close to the Paintings,"[50] as a "loose, kaleidoscopic maze of contrasting viewpoints" and interacting works—a sense furthered by the central, abstracted figures Nelson portrays in them.[4][22][51] Critics such as Dan Cameron noted Nelson's disruption of the frontality of conventional painting, as well as the evolution of the physical presence of her two-sided works into a new, metaphorical level.[52][53]