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Frederick Nitsch

Frederick Nitsch

Mixed Media

Frederick Nitsch (b. 1984) is a painter, collagist, sculptor, and poet. His work is wide-ranging in its content and materials, but is unified by a lively spirit of experimentation and an absurd sense of humor.

Nitsch considers his paintings as a kind of process art, explaining “I see what happens and then I make the next move.” He thins out his acrylics into translucent coats, spreading one on top of another. Through this accumulation of layers, Nitsch builds complex tones and ethereal textures. They’re bounded in sharp-edged shapes, the whole ensemble often varnished for a brilliant sheen. Many works also incorporate fragments that the artist has cut from vintage magazines and stitched together into playful constellations. Nitsch is drawn to black and white photos of faded grandeur and staccato snatches of text, the phrases deployed as ironic jabs and provocative riddles.

Nitsch’s cartooning helps him to sharpen his skills of improvisation. He describes, “It’s like I’m doing an exquisite corpse with myself.” During the first months of the pandemic, Nitsch started making these spare drawings on the bus and enjoyed the vulnerability of the resulting shaky lines. The big-eyed characters take some cues from “Garfield”, though their off-kilter exchanges about futility and loneliness would be right at home in a Beckett play. 

An evacuee from the world of academic philosophy, Nitsch says ,“I always used art to escape thinking.” But it seems that this flight was brief and unsuccessful, because he then started to “use art to do thinking.” Nitsch currently lives in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood with his cats Wendy and Wally. He was a founding member of Chicago’s cooperatively run Agitator Gallery.

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