Nicole Irene Anderson
Working in oil, casein, graphite pencil, charcoal, and metalpoint, I create paintings and drawings that explore themes of land, home, climate change, and the psychological impact of the expansion of the American West. My work examines the culture and motivations that brought settlers in California to this moment through landscape painting. My work depicts a version of California as a land burdened by a violent and emotionally loaded history. I visit overlooked places that become visual metaphors for more significant societal and environmental concerns, making a case for empathy and care that should be practiced for the land that holds us.
Nicole Irene Anderson (b. 1993, Cambria, CA, United States) earned a B.F.A. in Painting/Drawing from California College of the Arts in San Francisco and is a current M.F.A. candidate at the University of California, Davis. The artist has been featured in solo exhibitions at Johansson Projects (Oakland, CA) and the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (San Luis Obispo, CA) and has been included in group exhibitions at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (Napa, CA), the Museum of Sonoma County (Santa Rosa, CA), and the David Brower Center (Berkeley, CA). Her work has also been featured in fair booths in FOG FOCUS at the FOG Design+Art fair (San Francisco, CA) and Untitled Miami Beach with Johansson Projects. Anderson has received grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and the Discovered: Emerging Visual Artist Grant from Creative Sonoma and is a recipient of the Mary Lou Osborn Award from the University of California, Davis. Her work has been documented in catalogs and featured in New American Paintings. Anderson is represented by Johansson Projects in Oakland, California. She currently lives in Santa Rosa and works in Davis, California.
Johansson Projects: Nicole Irene Anderson, A Tangled Coexistence | January 16, 2025 | Lisa Plachy for 7×7
[…] The artist creates fantastic scenes of scenic unease in richly colorful pieces haunted by loneliness yet shimmering with the sublime. Through exacting detail, Anderson critically appraises the greed and violence of western expansion and questions of what land both offers and requires.” LINK
A Beautiful Destruction | January 3, 2025 by Sarah Bass for Midbrow
Perspectives twist, distances collapse, and improbable layers appear. The eerily beautiful violence of a takeover echo throughout, the inevitable wildness of death to come. LINK
“A Tangled Coexistence” is a sharp commentary on the California dream | November 8, 2024 by Tony Bravo for San Francisco Chronicle Datebook
Anderson’s works are a sharp commentary on the California dream and the banal, everyday nightmares that come hand in hand with it. LINK
