A flatland of forms: Thomas Nozkowski's abstract paintings have long been characterized by their small scale and use of eccentric shapes against variegated grounds. His work was recently the subject of a trio of shows in the U.S. and Britain

present in Thomas Nozkowski's paintings is the vernacular of our modern world, streamlined into essential shapes that elicit myriad associations. Through a diligent fine-tuning of form, Nozkowski achieves a delicate equilibrium between recognition and unrecognition, figuration and abstraction. This is the source of the opulent complexity of his work, along with its resistance to critical pigeonholing.

Born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1944, and educated at Cooper Union in New York City, where he has worked since, Nozkowski is in many ways an artist's artist--"quietly influential," as critic Barry Schwabsky recently put it. (1) Trained primarily by Abstract Expressionists--most significantly, Nicholas Marsicano, but also David Lund and Angelo Ippolito--he absorbed their lessons on the virtues of materiality and vigorous paint handling, but quickly abandoned the movement's penchant for grandiosity. Living in New York in the late 1960s, Nozkowski was undoubtedly aware of Minimalism and Pop, but while his subsequent sleek forms and artificial colors can be said to evoke both those movements, his reliance on intuition and earnestly handcrafted, painterly application precludes any attempt to categorically align him with either.

As much as any single factor, it is the consistently small size of Nozkowski's works that places him outside Minimalism and Pop--as well as Abstract Expressionism and its varied progeny. In the world of postwar art, Nozkowski is practically a miniaturist. His paintings are almost all 16 by 20 inches, and 30 by 40 inches is as grand as he gets. The artist views his decision to work small as not just personal, but political. Influenced by the protest movements of the late 1960s and early '70s, this commitment was decidedly anti-institutional. As he recalls:

I was really trying to think something through and politics was informing every thing that we were doing in those days, with Vietnam, with the early days of feminism, and with the Civil Rights movement.... I felt that I could no longer do big paintings that were for an audience of the very institutions that I then despised. The last thing I wanted to do was to paint for a museum, to paint for a bank lobby. I wanted to paint paintings that could lit in my friends' rooms. (2)

His resolve undoubtedly came with a certain amount of risk, as the ubiquity of supersized art meant more modest works tended to be seen as less important. This was only compounded by his frequent use of canvas-board, a medium usually relegated to Sunday painters and high-school art students.

Nozkowski's ability to remain a vital and innovative artist is therefore an achievement in and of itself. Though he graduated from Cooper Union in 1967, and had early contact with some powerful art-world players (he worked for Betty Parsons as an art handler), he did not have his first solo show until 1979.

What is striking is that Nozkowski has taken a format that originated as a bourgeois convention--the domestic-scaled painting--and claimed it as politically subversive. His devotion to smallness also reflects a broader art-historical moment--one in which avant-gardism had become so much the norm that a certain anti-avant-gardism conversely became an effective way to resist conformity. However, the complexity of his paintings belies their moderate sizes; Nozkowski achieves monumentality in minute measurements. His paintings lure the eye to their surfaces and demand prolonged looking. At exhibitions of his work, one notices people spending real time with pictures--tilting their heads, stepping back, forward, moving to the next painting, and quickly returning for another look. It is an intimate, often exhausting, exercise.

A traveling exhibition that opened early this year in Dallas at Southern Methodist University's Pollock Gallery and traveled to the commercial gallery Haunch of Venison in London--his first solo show in Europe--provided an overview of Nozkowski's work, from 1992 to 2003. (Last year the artist also had solo shows at the New York Studio School; Revolution Gallery, Ferndale, Mich.; Max Protetch Gallery, New York; and the Nelson Gallery at the University of California, Davis.) Individually, the 20-odd paintings in the Dallas-London show are universes unto themselves, with their own laws of physics--each an autonomous "Nozkowskiland," as Peter Schjeldahl once called it. (3)

Framing and composition chez Nozkowski are finely calibrated, but appear almost offhand and arbitrary, as though offering a single glimpse of an infinitely larger cosmos. A 1999 canvas in the exhibition, Untitled (7-127), is largely occupied by a bluish-gray painted lattice covered in white wash. The lattice is contained by a thin black border that modulates between elegant arabesques and cartoonish curves--a juxtaposition common in Nozkowski's work. The border is echoed in the conglomeration of baroque forms--resembling decorative architectural details--that violently jut in from the bottom left. The boldness and sharp angularity of these shapes contrast with the subtle effects of the background. Despite the harmonious interplay of these components, the overall image remains irresolvable--both as representation and as pure abstraction--a dissonance that only heightens the painting's appeal.