Image: MASSIMODECARLO, Milan
Nicole Wittenberg’s ‘Why the Butterflies’ remains on view in Hong Kong through 7 October 2026. Running from 26 June, the exhibition is the artist’s first in Asia.
The show presents new paintings of coastlines, flowers and gardens at dusk. Each painting was made in a single day and was never reworked. While making the works, Wittenberg continuously played Prince’s ‘Piano & A Microphone’, a 34-minute recording of the musician in his home studio with his piano and a microphone. At the beginning of the recording, Prince calls to the sound editor to balance his voice and piano. The album moves from ‘17 Days’ into ‘Purple Rain’ and then ‘A Case of You’; its final track is called ‘Why the Butterflies’. The album was released in 2018, two years after Prince’s death.
Wittenberg first explores her subjects through loose pastel compositions made en plein air, then reimagines them on canvas. She has described her images as “the way things look when my eyes are closed”.
The exhibition includes paintings at various scales. For smaller works, Wittenberg paints with a broom of the same type she uses for much larger paintings, compressing a wall-sized gesture into an intimate format. She has likened the process to “dancing on a handkerchief.”
The coast of Maine is a landscape to which Wittenberg has returned for years. ‘Dark Harbour 3’ depicts a small island on a lake in Maine after sunset, an image with which the artist has engaged for years. ‘Night Bloom’ comes from the artist’s friend’s apartment in Paris; its original pastel was made from memory. “I was painting what I remembered of the hot summer night, three tulips just about to lose their petals,” Wittenberg said. “I was trying to return to a fleeting moment.” ‘Seat of Buddha 2’ was made at dusk in the mountains of Thailand, in response to a Buddhist proverb that the lotus rises from mud to become a jewel.
Wittenberg is an American artist based in New York City, and is also a curator, professor and writer. She was born in San Francisco and is listed as born in 1979. She received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ John Koch Award for Best Young Figurative Painter in 2012. Between 2011 and 2014, she taught at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University. In 2017, she was a professor in the Critical Theory Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Her works are held in collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Albertina in Vienna, the Boston Museum of Fine Art and the Aishti Foundation in Beirut.
