Hoffmann + Maler + Wallenberg is pleased to announce Small Things Brought Together, a solo exhibition by Nikki Katsikas (b. 1985, New York). The show features a series of twenty oil paintings on canvas, all made in 2022 and 2023.

Katsikas has spent most of her life in the US Northeast and is greatly influenced by the landscapes, art, and celebrations that call the region home. Her structures and gestures have a storybook quality that exaggerates the things most lovely in her world. Her new work turns inward, to her recurring themes of changing seasons, afternoon adventures, and the comforts of domesticity, and outward to the history of the region, for instance seasonal harvests and women’s suffrage.

In describing the influences behind her subject matter, Katsikas lists “past experiences, a familiar memory, recognizable ‘is that . . . ?’ moments.” Regarding Small Things Brought Together, she elaborates, “I would say the works are more specifically European, with some art history and classic cinema mixed in. There are some paintings depicting the good life mixed in with doses of reality—and a bit of mischief.”

Mischief is front and center in The Cat Burglar (2023), a work depicting a scene from Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955), a film that plays with the lighter side of the thriller genre set in the glittering locale of the French Riviera. Although Katsikas offers just a moment from this crime adventure, and another in Stealing Venus (2022), the gentleness of her subjects’ gestures and bright palette reassures us that everything will work out before the final reel.

The small scale of the works in Small Things Brought Together emphasizes the precious nature of both object making itself and the subjects of the paintings. Inspiration is drawn equally from embroidery, lifestyle magazines, front-page news, and mid-century painting, reduced and rendered in Katsikas’s inimitable style and palette, imbued with effervescent curiosity and color. As the show’s title suggests, each moment captured may be as brief as the size of the work itself, but when brought together they fashion the artist’s distinct viewpoint of a world we thought we knew from a perspective that sweetly reminds us that it’s time to reexamine our interiors, routines, and personal histories for untold riches.

Katsikas studied at the School of Visual Arts in
New York, where she received her BFA in 2008.

Small Things Brought Together will be accompanied by a publication from HMW Books, presenting all the works in the show.