For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Nielsen has produced an astoundingly large and varied body of work. Nielsen’s career is distinguished by her preoccupation with landscape and her inventive use of imagery, which she derives from many sources. This exhibition includes more than eighty drawings and paintings, the earliest of which date from the 1970s and the most recent of which were completed in 1994. As a whole, what characterizes Nielsen’s oeuvre is its inventive range, scale, and scope, and her mastery of a number of divergent painting conventions. Delicate pen and ink drawings from the 1970s are followed by densely painted and compact oil paintings from the 1980s, which, in turn, give way to magnificently opulent works from the 1990s.

Published on the occasion of a twenty-five year retrospective of Margaret Nielsen’s work, January 28 - March 26, 1995 SMMoA