Adrian Nivola

Nivola tackles a variety of themes in his imagery, working from memory and driven by an effort to convey an enduring quality of light in ephemeral scenes. Among his subjects are women in interiors, landscapes of Idaho and the East End of Long Island, and jockeys after a race.
 
In figurative compositions Nivola paints the people closest to him in the context of a shared interior space. With a lush impasto technique his delicate dabs of pigment are tactile and luminous. 
 
In his delicately layered pastel landscapes Nivola articulates the vast, radiant expanse of valleys in Idaho. In these images, the sublime scale of the Western American landscape becomes a foil for the sparse and unlikely structures of its inhabitants. Nivola’s mastery of scale is evident, where he captures a breadth of infinite distance on a small format. A third subject which engages Nivola’s eye and hand is the ephemeral light on the jerseys of horse jockeys which he studies at the Belmont Racetrack. The sumptuous palette and accent on costume recalls Degas’s pastels of the races.
 
A simultaneous engagement in multiple mediums and techniques suits Nivola who grew up under the influence of his artist grandparents. The Sardinian-born sculptor Costantino Nivola was celebrated for his large-scale sandcast murals and his grandmother Ruth Guggenheim Nivola created jewelry from silk and metal thread. Through the legacy of his grandparents, Nivola inherited a formative philosophy of life in art. 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.