Dona Nelson

Dona Nelson (born 1947) is an American painter, best known for immersive, gestural, primarily abstract works employing unorthodox materials, processes and formats to disrupt conventional notions of painting and viewership.

[6][7] According to New York Times critic Roberta Smith, Nelson has dodged the burden of a "superficially consistent style," sustained by "an adventuresome emphasis on materials" and an athletic approach to process that builds on the work of Jackson Pollock.

[29] Critics especially note her "adventurously tough-minded approach to process," which "flirts with painting’s destruction"[8] by rejecting the "conventionally ingratiating"[30] in favor of dissonant techniques, surfaces, and colors.

In the 1980s, Nelson shifted to painterly representational work (e.g., Daily News, 1983) featuring ordinary interiors, landscapes and cityscapes, portrayed with an emotional realism and unfussy physicality.

[43][44][30] Reviewers commented on the new work's collision of "formal order and procedural chaos,"[13] and raw and finished, which they found both dislocating and inviting, its power deriving from a "freeze-framing" of the painting process that revealed a series of discrete, nonlinear acts and decisions.

[30][43][45] Describing this passage in Nelson's work through the painting Octopus Blue (1990), Klaus Kertess wrote, "We are confronted by an organism wrestling with its self-formation—complex, mysterious, fierce, playful, sensual.

[47][48] In 2016, Nelson returned to the figure in her two-sided, variously constructed "Box" works[49]—free-standing, door-sized painted panels that verge on architecture and continue to employ unconventional materials and processes.

[4][22] Critics describe installations of the work, such as her 2017 show "Models Stand Close to the Paintings,"[50] as a "loose, kaleidoscopic maze of contrasting viewpoints" and interacting works—a sense furthered by the central, abstracted figures Nelson portrays in them.