TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY is pleased to present “I exist as I am”, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Hans Hofmann and Nancy Diamond on view August 4th through September 4th, 2022.
Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) is one of the most important figures of postwar American art. Celebrated for his exuberant, color-filled canvases, and renowned as an influential teacher for generations of artists—first in his native Germany, then in New York and Provincetown—Hofmann played a pivotal role in the development of Abstract Expressionism. From his early landscapes of the 1930s, to his “slab” paintings of the late 1950s, and his abstract works at the end of his career upon his death in 1966, Hofmann continued to create boldly experimental color combinations and formal contrasts that transcended genre and style.
Nancy Diamond (b. 1962) is an artist’s artist, currently living and working in upstate New York. She graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in studio art. Recently introduced to Diamond’s work, Tayloe strongly believes that these paintings will bring a fresh conversation into the gallery however, this writer is not certain that anyone could have imagined the energy these elegant paintings would bring to the newly installed exhibition. Diamond’s work is both familiar and mysterious. The paintings of Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keefe and Helen Frankenthaler immediately come to come to mind. Her familiar yet enigmatic art speaks of Impressionism, Color Field, Abstraction and Minimalism.
Throughout the exhibition we find vignettes where single works by Diamond are paired next to individual large-scale paintings by Hofmann. These intimate conversations reveal the commonality between Hofmann’s historic abstraction and Diamond’s minimalist landscapes to be undeniable and informative. Ultimately, despite the practice by art historians, critics and theorists to compare and contrast the work of one artist to another in the pursuit to find understanding, it is important to look at Diamond’s paintings as exactly what they are – beautiful, mysterious and filled both with the influences of modern and contemporary art but also with a spirit reminiscent of the magic realism that Gabriel Garcia Marquez painted across the pages of his magnum opus “Love in the Time of Cholera.”
-Jacqueline Crist, Co-curator
