Nina Tichava’s work is about relationships – relationships between materials, between forms, between the viewer and the artwork. Through a layering process developed over decades that integrates painting and printmaking techniques, Tichava weaves together geometry, texture, color, and pattern. Elegant and refined, Tichava’s compositions are built of complex layers, many of which are over-painted and concealed.
While her work is abstract, Tichava is drawing on botanical and architectural forms for inspiration. As artists do, she is absorbing the world around her and integrating that into her compositions. One of the hallmarks of Tichava’s work are her meticulously hand-applied paint beads – thousands of tiny droplets of paint painstakingly applied to create screens and patterns. The resulting paintings are intricate and deeply worked while simultaneously effortless and flowing: gradients of color cascade, circular forms intersect, and linear patterns provide grounding.
There is a depth and a warmth to Tichava’s work – it is emotional and imperfect. The paintings are collections of the artist’s experience of moments: her combined glimpses, thoughts, memories and objects.
NINA TICHAVA was raised in rural northern New Mexico and the California Bay Area. She received her BFA from California College of the Arts [+ Crafts] (San Francisco/Oakland) in 2003 and is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award Grant (2007) and has exhibited professionally since 2009. She was influenced by her father, a construction worker and mathematician and by her mother, who is an artist and designer. The reflections of these dualities—country to city, pragmatist to artist, nature to technology—are essential to and evident in her paintings. Tichava lives and works in Santa Fe, NM.
