Nathan Oliveira

Oliveira’s invented forms live just outside the realm of possibility. The artist Nathan Oliveira (1928-2010) liked to say that he thought of himself as an abstract artist whose work “had to be about something.” That “something,”—most often a human figure, but sometimes an animal, wing, head or mask—was the physical manifestation of Oliveira’s poetic imagination; an invented form that lives just outside the realm of possibility.

Over the long span of his career Oliveira worked in a variety of media including painting, drawing, lithography monotype and sculpture, challenging himself to create forms with an air of mystery that allowed room for his viewers to find their own meanings. “I set it up to the degree that it gives you something recognizable to interact with,” he once offered, "and if you’re creative, you create your own metaphor.”

The works on view at the Triton, selected from the artist’s estate by him son Joseph, will present examples of Oliveira’s evocations of form in both two and three dimensions. In the Cowell Room Gallery oil paintings ranging from small studies of faces to a monumental canvas from the "Windhover" series will demonstrate the artist’s engagement with the flexibility of the oil medium. A selection of bronzes—including masks and figures—will show how Oliveira’s painterly sensibility remained tangible in the sensitive surfaces of his three dimensional works. In the Triton’s Rotunda, where works on paper will be featured, examples of the artist’s "Imi" and "Santa Fe" watercolors of female figures will join a series of lithographs from the 1960s. Olivera’s fluid watercolors, in which he allowed the paint to form rivers and pools that soak into the paper then coalesce into figures, are among his most distinctive inventions.

Committed to the idea that making art involved finding unique forms Nathan Oliveira: Variations of Form will offer a fresh opportunity for viewers to encounter the myriad forms of his personal universe and appreciate them on their own terms.