Image: Craig F. Starr Gallery, New York
Craig F. Starr Gallery in New York is showing 'Don Nice: Early Works, 1963–68', an exhibition that brings together a selection of the artist’s early painting and sculpture, organized in collaboration with the artist’s estate. The presentation is on view through August 21 and focuses on two bodies of work that helped define Nice’s early development: his larger-than-life American motifs based on labels and advertisements, and his detailed renderings of everyday objects and consumer products.
The gallery’s press materials identify the exhibition as a look at Nice’s work from 1963 to 1968, with the installation including paintings such as 'Apple III', 'Apple II', 'Pear', 'Lemon Stripe', 'Oranges', 'Star Crest', 'Cupcakes', 'Rolls', 'Crackers' and 'Walnuts II', alongside 'Object Box' works from 1964. According to the gallery, the 'Object Boxes' were first shown in 'The Box Show' at Byron Gallery in 1965, while the label- and ad-based paintings were first presented as a group at Feigen + Herbert Gallery in 1963.
The exhibition situates Nice among artists active in the decades after Abstract Expressionism, a period the gallery describes as one in which younger artists were responding to that movement’s intensity while also seeking other directions. The press release notes that in 1962 Nice entered the Graduate School of Painting at Yale University at age 30, after a period in Europe where he apprenticed with the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka. At Yale, he studied under Alex Katz and Joseph Albers.
The gallery also places Nice’s early work in relation to his biography and sources of imagery. Born in rural California, he encountered images not in museums but on fruit crate labels from his father’s packing plants. By 1960, the release says, he had begun experimenting with these vernacular pictures, shifting their scale and perspective. The resulting paintings foreground the image as both surface and object, and the gallery says this approach aligned him with Pop Art while differing from it in tone, since Nice treated the imagery as material for study rather than irony or distance.
In the exhibition text, Craig F. Starr Gallery characterizes Nice’s early label and advertisement paintings as part of his arrival in New York and the formation of a mode of 'personal realism' grounded in everyday forms. The later object paintings, by contrast, isolate sweets, savory foods and fruits against stripped grounds, removing context and heightening their physical presence. The gallery describes that shift as a move toward singular forms in which scale becomes a perceptual condition and ordinary subjects are rendered monumental.
The show is accompanied by a digital catalogue, available from the gallery, and the gallery notes summer hours of Monday through Friday, 11 am to 5:30 pm. Craig F. Starr Gallery is located at 5 East 73rd Street in New York.
