ROCKLAND, ME.- The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) is presenting the exhibition Nicole Wittenberg: Cheek to Cheek, a new grouping of the artist’s largest paintings to date. Depicting lush, color-saturated flowers, stems, and leaves against hot, florescent grounds, the enormous canvases surround the viewer with unabashed beauty. “It’s always been a hope of mine to make romance pictures,” says Wittenberg. Presented in CMCA’s Main Gallery, lit by Maine’s inimitable north light, the exhibition remains on view through September 14, 2025.
Known for her previous erotic works of figures in the landscape, in recent years, Wittenberg has spent long periods each summer immersed in the landscape of coastal Maine, where she encountered the wildflowers that serve as references for her current imagery. Capturing their ephemeral nature in quick pastel studies created on-site, the artist uses these small-scale drawings as jumping off points for the mural-sized paintings created in her studio. Wittenberg reflects, “Wildflowers like these grow on the side of the road; they seem to portray the feeling of our time, a flower that grows without tending and returns year-after-year, despite our best efforts to contain them or weed them out.”
Taking its title, Cheek to Cheek, from the iconic 1935 song composed by Irving Berlin, for his musical Top Hat, “heaven, I’m in heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak…” the exhibition at CMCA embraces the viewer in the heart-stopping sensuousness of Wittenberg’s floral compositions. Vibrating with energy, the seductive, electric-hued blooms fill the canvas and the eye. The artist “sees these new paintings as a group of interlocking forms that overlay to create a massing of stems, flowers, and leaves—in that way, these are Baroque images, where the ‘parts’ of the painting fit together and spiral upwards.”
Nicole Wittenberg: Cheek to Cheek is curated by CMCA’s Executive Director and Chief Curator Emeritus Suzette McAvoy. The exhibition at CMCA is presented in concert with Nicole Wittenberg: Sailboat in the Moonlight at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, Maine, and Ain’t Misbehavin’ at Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris, France. The three concurrent exhibitions are also marked by the publication of Wittenberg’s first career-spanning monograph by Monacelli Press, with texts by Suzanne Hudson, David Salle, Devon Zimmerman, and an interview by Jarrett Earnest.
Nicole 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 2011–14 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.
Wittenberg’s works are in prominent collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Albertina, Vienna; 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). She is based in New York and Maine.
