Nicholas Krushenick

About This Piece

The hard-edged paintings of American artist Nicholas Krushenick earned him the nickname, the “father of Pop abstraction.” His works fused non-representational geometric forms with the graphic lines and high-keyed color palettes of Pop art and comic books. Krushenick’s moniker was also a workaround for his hard to classify style, which shares aesthetic attributes with color field painting, Minimalism, Op art, and Abstract Expressionism. He studied painting at the Art Students League of New York and the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, and in the late 1950s set up a framing shop in the East Village with his brother; it later became Brata Gallery, exhibiting artists including Yayoi Kusama and Ronald Bladen. Krushenick developed his signature style in the early 1960s, exemplified by works such as Son of King Kong (1966), which is composed of alternating bands of opaque contrasting colors. He had his first major solo exhibition at Graham Gallery in 1962, soon followed by participation in the “Post Painterly Abstraction” (1964) group show organized by the influential art critic Clement Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has since been widely exhibited and his works are held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among many others.