2019 Catalogue Archive

Nicole Fein’s watercolors are as nuanced and ethereal as they are labor intensive to make. Her painstaking process creates truly gorgeous gradients in different colors and shapes. Formerly tranquil in tone, her work has steadily increased in saturation and visual weight, making for a more pronounced spatial depth and dimensionality. Here, a toned, earthy-yellow appears to protrude from the surface of the watercolor paper where it gradually pools, only to fall back into the white of the picture plane. Fein’s work has a beautiful formal cadence, rich with the ability to draw the viewer closer to the work. Fein lives and works in San Francisco; her drawings have been collected by numerous public collections including the MFA, Houston; the Menil Collection, Houston; The Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge; and the Whitney Museum, New York.