Nikholis Planck: Incoming Stages

Bringing together a selection of paintings and drawings, Incoming Stages considers the continued relevance of observational painting within contemporary practice. Working from direct experience, Planck engages landscape, architecture, and transient atmospheric conditions as sites through which perception, memory, and material process converge. His work enters into dialogue with a lineage of American painting associated with figures such as James McNeill Whistler, George Inness, Edward Hopper, and the broader traditions of nineteenth and twentieth-century East Coast landscape painting. Across these historical precedents, observation serves to translate lived experience into psychological and spatial form. Within Planck's work, the visible world becomes a framework through which questions of duration, attention, and place are continually renegotiated.

Central to the exhibition is an engagement with materiality that parallels the artist's commitment to observation. Planck frequently works in oil on waxed paper, charcoal, copper panel, and reclaimed boards, allowing the physical characteristics of each support to participate in the construction of the image. Layers of wax medium accumulate on the surface, producing passages of density and translucency that register time. His charcoal drawings operate through a similar economy, distilling observed experience into gestures that remain open and responsive to their subjects.

Throughout, observation is approached as an accumulative process. Light shifts across a hillside; a stand of trees dissolves into the atmosphere, and structures emerge from their surroundings. The resulting works occupy a representative space where the specificity of a given place is filtered through perception. Rather than presenting fixed descriptions of the world, Planck's paintings and drawings propose a mode of sustained attention in which landscape is understood as something continuously unfolding.

Nikholis Planck (b. 1987, Arlington, VA) lives and works in New York. Recent exhibitions include Arachnophobia at Kaje, Brooklyn (2025); FW pt.2 at High Art, Paris (2025); Under Five Windows at Reading Room, Naar, Australia (2024); Oh What a World at Jack Barrett Gallery, New York (2023); Harry Smith's Shirt at F Magazine, Houston (2023); Invitations to Tremble at Management, New York (2023); In the Vast Toothpick Cities of the Future at Make Room, Los Angeles (2022); Le Biscuit à Soupe at High Art, Arles (2022); Catechism at Bridget Donahue, New York (2022); Latent Teloneum with Heidi Lau at Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn (2021); Anarchy of Imagination at Kerry Schuss, New York (2021); and Mortal Coil at Magenta Plains, New York (2021).