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Overview
Born in Oakland, California, Nathan Oliveira was a leading artist in the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Oliveira earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in fine art from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in San Francisco. He was a professor of art at Stanford University for 32 years.
The artist created representational works influenced by the abstract expressionist style and is widely recognized for his solitary figures. Aside from this subject, the artist also depicted animals, notably birds of prey, nudes, masks, and faces. Oliveira created his artwork in various mediums including painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture.
The Triton Museum of Art is pleased to present a collection of the late artist's works, curated by his son Joseph Oliveira, for view in two of our exhibition spaces. This selection of artwork will include works on canvas and paper as well as sculptures.
The Triton Museum of Art would like to extend its thanks and appreciation to Joseph Oliveira for making this exhibition possible.
About the Artist
By John Seed
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 Museum, selected from the artist’s estate by his 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 monumental canvases depicting Stelae will demonstrate the artist’s engagement with the flexibility of the oil medium. In the Triton’s Rotunda, where more works on paper will be featured, examples of the artist’s Imi and Santa Fe watercolors of female figures will join a few works of unique figures from the 1960s and 1970s. 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. A selection of bronzes, found in both galleries—including masks and figures—will show how Oliveira’s painterly sensibility remained tangible in the sensitive surfaces of his three-dimensional works. 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.
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Nathan Oliveira, Mask V, bronze, 2007