Adrian Nivola

Adrian Nivola

Early Life And Landscapes

13 February — 29 March 2026

EARLY LIFE AND LANDSCAPES

Maya Frodeman Gallery is pleased to present Early Life and Landscapes, a solo exhibition of oil paintings and pastels by artist Adrian Nivola. This exhibition, his third with Maya Frodeman Gallery, focuses on two themes: Nivola’s experience of having a child, and his travel through regions of France and Italy.

Since the birth of his son two years ago, Nivola has been captivated by observing the child’s emerging consciousness, and by moments of unlikely serenity in early, sleepless family life: “My child, like all infants, suddenly and mysteriously evolved from a vaguely alert amoeba into a forceful personality, the way a work of art, with any luck, sometimes can. When I look at my son, I am moved above all by the fragility of his trust in me which is, of course, a universal experience for all parents. It seems to me that if I can succeed in capturing something of that expression in him, which has so elevated the stakes of life for me, it might do the same for my audience.”

In his landscapes, the close proximity of Nivola’s subjects shifts to a more distant perspective. Here, the artist invites the viewer into expansive open skies, remote from the confines of domesticity.

“As soon as I became a father,” he reflects, “I felt driven to explore two paths in my work and two correspondingly different points of view; one up close, the other from afar. I was fascinated by closely observing family life and at the same time, longed for contact with natural settings, especially the land and warm light in parts of southern Europe.”

Nivola’s work is emphatically small in format yet often monumental in scale. The small format suits his touch with the material of both paint and pastel. It also necessitates close contact with his subjects, rather than requiring the viewer to stand at a distance in order to perceive the whole composition. Nivola works from memory, assisted by drawings and photographs rather than directly from nature. He believes that the process of recollecting his experience helps him to distill what matters visually and emotionally.

“It is hopefully as surprising to my viewers as it is to me that with powdered dust, I have been able to generate light.” This effect is hard won through reworking and layering in Nivola’s preferred mediums of soft pastel and oil paint.

“The pastels allow me to embrace an experimental process where I can at any point introduce radical changes to a composition because the pigment is less prone to muddying. I find oil paint less forgiving but also more inherently rich and luminous.”

Nivola’s aesthetic sensibility was influenced at an early age by his artist grandparents: the Sardinianborn sculptor Costantino Nivola, who was celebrated for his large-scale sandcast murals, and Ruth Guggenheim Nivola, who created jewelry from silk and metal thread. Through his grandparents, Nivola inherited, among other things, a commitment to the value of craftsmanship. He earned a Master’s degree at the New York Studio School in 2008 after graduating with a BFA with distinction in painting at Yale.

1/2 x 10 3/4 inches

7 1/4 x 8 inches

6 1/2 x 6 1/4 inches

1/2 x 3 3/4 inches

1/2 x 5 1/4 inches

8 1/8 x 4 1/2 inches

5 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches

1/4 x 9 1/2 inches

9 1/4 x 13 3/4 inches

Near Place Vintimille, Paris, 2025

Coming into View, 2025

Artist Statement

My choice of subject matter comes out of a wish to engage as deeply as possible with the present content of my own life in so far as it might be of interest to an audience. From all of the scenarios that compel me to take a closer look (for example, my boy’s face when I catch a glimpse of his interest in something), I aim to identify the expression that feels most urgent to capture. This is not necessarily a moral choice. However, often it is. Impishness and absurdity appeal to me as much as other more serious attitudes. That said, because I imagine that if, or when I lose my sight, and with it the world, I would like, ideally, to rest assured that I dedicated my efforts to representing all that I will most miss.

When I repeatedly return to work on a picture, and inevitably struggle with it, this notion, like a memento mori, helps me determine what matters within the ordinary stuff of a day and a life. - Adrian Nivola

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

66 SOUTH GLENWOOD STREET

JACKSON

HOLE, WYOMING

TEL 307 733 0555

This catalog complements Adrian Nivola’s exhibition

Early Life and Landscapes

Maya Frodeman Gallery

13 February - 29 March 2026

Images courtesy the artist

© 2026 All Rights Reserved

After the Bath, (detail), Gouache on paper

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY