13 Facts About Nicholas Krushenick

Nicholas Krushenick was an American abstract painter, collagist and printmaker whose mature artistic style straddled Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism and Color Field.

Nicholas Krushenick was active in the New York art scene from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, before he began focusing his time as a professor at the University of Maryland.

In 1969, on the heels of another solo at Pace Gallery, Nicholas Krushenick was the Fall term Artist-In-Residence at Dartmouth College's Hopkins Center for the Arts, where he mentored students and created new works, culminating in an exhibition of paintings and prints at the college's Jaffe-Friede Gallery.

Between his primary pursuit of painting and tertiary collage practice, Nicholas Krushenick pursued a keen interest in printmaking.

The companion book to Graphicstudio: Contemporary Art from the Collaborative Workshop at the University of South Florida, a 1991 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, notes that "Nicholas Krushenick began to experiment with screenprinting in the late 1950s and became an active printmaker by the mid-1960s," including during a 1965 fellowship at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles.

In 1970 at Graphicstudio, Nicholas Krushenick briefly returned to lithography, producing works embracing straight lines and angular, "more architectonic" forms.

Nicholas Krushenick then embarked, after many visiting stints at various institutions during the prior decade, on his only long-term engagement as an educator, serving as a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1977 to 1991.

The latter occurred after Nicholas Krushenick died of liver cancer in New York on February 5,1999, at age 69.

Nicholas Krushenick was part of a generation that at first emulated and soon rebelled against Abstract Expressionism, the dominant painting movement in post-war America.

Nicholas Krushenick landed somewhere between them all, both embracing and rejecting elements of many styles considered distinct, including Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism, and Color Field.

In 1956, when he gave his first public showing in a group exhibition, Nicholas Krushenick's paintings were muddy and imprecise.

In 1959, Nicholas Krushenick discarded what he called the "dirty kitchen" look of oil paints and replaced it with the "delicious" electricity of Liquitex acrylics, which had just become commercially available.

The raucous candy-cane stripes that Nicholas Krushenick uses as the basic device of his abstractions do not 'contain' the painting.