Dry Ice, 2008 Painting

Born in Minneapolis, Lisa Nankivil is noted for her luminous, striped-format oil paintings and abstract monoprints. Building on the painterly traditions of American and European modernism, Nankivil uses an intuitive process of layering and manipulating innumerable bands of color and transparent glazes. The vitality of her abstract canvases is heightened by the effects of optical mixing, encouraging close scrutiny of the complex interplays of color, texture, and light. Formally and conceptually, Nankivil's work explores the ambiguities of pictorial space, revealing the subjective nature of perception. According to art historian William Peterson, the striped format of Nankivil's paintings evolved while she was concentrating on certain figure-ground relationships in her work. "I was searching for ways to make the background as essential as the image," she says. "I began to explore qualities such as motion, ascendance, and hierarchy through painted stripes, and eventually the image fell away leaving me to navigate the implications of the vertical and the horizontal by painting only the orientations with stripes." A phrase in the art writings of John Berger, "Home is where the vertical meets the horizontal..." helped her as she began to explore the physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of her discovery. To me, she says, this phrase refers to a sense of spiritual well being: finding ground in which to prosper. ______________________________ On the paintings of LISA NANKIVIL... If home is where the vertical meets the horizontal, as the art historian John Berger put it, then Lisa Nankivil has found her perfect pied-a-terre. Physically, her sensuous stripe paintings engage one or the other of these axes: the horizontal stripes recalling landscape, horizon, the pensive gaze: the vertical ones, a curtain or scrim inhibiting our view beyond, the alert body. Yet this home in Nankivil's paintings, this foot on the earth as the French say, is more than simply a compositional imperative, a systematic application of bands and stripes on canvas. Like paintings by Piet Mondrian or Agnes Martin, there is a metaphysical element that comes into play when the vertical and horizontal intersect, a spiritual urge for the perfection of geometry in our own chaotic existence.Nankivil enacts this tension through stripes that refuse to behave.