Nicholas Battis is a Brooklyn and Connecticut-based painter whose colorful, textured, and layered work investigates nature, process, the built environment, and the digital age. He received his MFA from Pratt Institute in 1989 and has been actively pursuing a career in the New York art scene ever since. His career in the arts is multifaceted, including art-making, curating, and consulting. He has had one-person shows of his painting at George Billis Gallery in New York and Los Angeles; Judy Saslow, Chicago; and Court Tree Collective, Brooklyn.
Artist Statement
I paint with fluid acrylic, water, forced air, gravity, and time. I draw, spray, wipe, tilt, and reposition the canvas — sometimes laying it flat to interrupt a drip before it runs its course. The earliest stages are unbridled: expressive, unplanned markmaking. I order to what emerges, choosing what to reinforce, obscure, or leave visible, adding new marks and layers that draw accidental formations into more deliberate relationships.
Transparent color and open forms let earlier layers stay visible. As they overlap and intersect, the process feels like weaving — building a surface that is also a record of what came before. Over time, I’ve come to see this movement between concealment and exposure as inseparable from my own process of coming out and becoming more fully formed as a person.
Color carries a related weight. I’ve long been drawn to bright, saturated hues — pink and lavender recur, with their familiar ties to gay identity and queer history, though the connection isn’t limited to those colors. I became aware that brightness dismissed as merely decorative could also be coded, and started asking what my own choices revealed about me.
In the paintings, color gets buried, muted, covered — and keeps glowing through anyway, or resurfaces when I strip paint back. I’m not sure the paintings ever finish becoming, so much as they arrive at a version of themselves I’m willing to stop and call done.
Contact me at nicholas.battis@gmail.com and follow me on Instagram
View selected works on Artsy
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Nicholas Battis 