Nathan Oliveira: Variations on Form
Nathan Oliveira
Marquee:
Nathan Oliveira, Figure #4, bronze
JAN 11 - APR 19
Will be on View in the
Rotunda and Cowell Galleries
In tandem with this exhibition, Pacific Art League of Palo Alto will also be
showcasing another exhibition of Nathan Oliveira’s work - Origins of Flight: The Windhover Studies by Nathan Oliveira (February 7 - March 25, 2025).
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 his work in 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.
Artist Statement:
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.