Nicole Wittenberg (born 1979) is an American artist based in New York City. She is a curator, professor, writer, and painter.
Wittenberg’s paintings reveal intimate, meditative scenes from her surrounding world. First exploring her chosen site through loose, pastel compositions rendered en plein air, Wittenberg captures the sensations of her subject matter, then reimagines them on canvas, where a single composition often undergoes a series of transformations.
Wittenberg draws from the rich art historical traditions of painters who find inspiration in the natural world, employing precedents set by the Venetian school, Impressionists, Fauves, and American landscape painters, among others. Wittenberg has developed series of paintings dedicated to the various natural sceneries she has encountered, including the enigmatic landscapes of Maine, the apocalyptic sunsets during the height of California’s wildfires, and bodies of water like the Aegean and Caribbean Seas, and Pacific Ocean. Though her compositions are created from observation and life, Wittenberg privileges an emotional state, rendering her surroundings in brilliant colors and automatic, expressive mark making. The resulting creations are personal, unmediated glimpses of universal vistas.
Wittenberg was born in San Francisco, CA, and received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003. She received the American Academy of Arts and Letters coveted John Koch Award for Best Young Figurative Painter in 2012. From 2011–2014 she served as a teacher at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and in 2017 she was a professor in the Critical Theory Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Wittenberg’s works are included in prominent collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Albertina, Vienna; the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Aishti Foundation, Beirut; and others. She has enjoyed recent solo exhibitions at Massimo de Carlo, Milan (2024); Fernberger Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); Journal Gallery, New York (2023); Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami (2023); and Acquavella Galleries, Palm Beach (2022). In summer 2025, she was the subject of three solo museum exhibitions: Maison La Roche, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris; the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, Maine; and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine.
Photo by Bronwen Wickstrom, 2025.
