Don Nice: Prints & Watercolors

Pace Prints is pleased to present Don Nice: Prints & Watercolors, on view June 23–July 22, 2016 at its 32 East 57th Street gallery. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on Wednesday, June 22, 5-7pm.

Don Nice’s refreshingly vibrant watercolors evoke the imagery of the Pop Art era, depicting familiar and nostalgic packaged foods such as Hershey’s candy wrappers, Planters Peanuts and Ritz Crackers. The paintings employ a distinctive style and a highly skilled use of the watercolor medium to energize each image and depart from the static nature of traditional Pop Art. As Antonia D. Bryan writes in the artist’s biography, Nice’s work shifts between the personal and the universal, the representational and the abstract.

A selection of the artist’s etchings and color lithographs, totems of American leisure, will also be on view in the exhibition.

Don Nice was born in Visalia, California in 1932. He received a BFA at the University of Southern California and an MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT. Nice’s interest in the American landscape began at a young age in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where his family instilled working class values and nurtured his burgeoning art-making practice. Nice served in the United States Army at Fort Ord before taking advantage of the GI bill and setting out on a trip to Rome in 1957. He spent the following two years in Florence, being drawn to the beauty of the landscape and the art historical legacy of Europe. From the late 1970s on, Nice would depict distinctly American motifs in his work, exploring his deeply held concerns for the environment and his belief in the interconnectedness of man and nature. His work appears in major public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Nice lives and works in Garrison, NY.