Throughout her distinguished career, Patricia Nix has positioned herself as a keen protagonist
in the development of late 20th century painting and sculpture. Her membership in the esteemed
National Academy of Design defines her as one of the most highly respected oil painters in
America. Nix's work is displayed throughout the world in prestigious public, corporate and
university collections, including the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art
and numerous other national museums. It has been reviewed by the major art publications and
critics of the day and used as cover art on multiple books, journals, and other publications,
including Reader's Digest. But perhaps the most important endorsement of Patricia Nix comes from
the many hundreds of discriminating private collectors around the world who have acquired her
work, some paying amounts exceeding $100,000 to make an original Nix part of their everyday
lives. We are delighted that our series of limited edition prints makes it affordable for a much
wider audience to own this beautiful work.
Although she has long resided in New York City and France, Nix is a native Texan and her
earliest influences came from the culture of Texas: deep religious faith, southwestern churches,
Mexican icons, and Native American crafts. Her work embraces art history and draws on the major
stylistic movements of our time, including cubism and surrealism. She has been hailed by critics
as the successor to such disparate artists as Georgia O'Keefe and Joseph Cornell, and has exhibited
with other contemporary masters including David Hockney, Willem De Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy
Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Louise Nevelson, Julian Schnabel, and Jim Dine. But despite these
culture-specific influences and comparisons, Nix's work is powerful on a universal level and
quite unique in the world of art. Indeed, the term "American Baroque" has been coined to describe
her work.
Upon seeing a Nix painting, one is first captivated by the lush, vibrant beauty of her colors
and imagery. But while opulently beautiful, Nix's work possesses a rigor that rejects
sentimentality. As with all art that is true and lasting, Nix's challenges the viewer to
respond. She seeks both to entertain and to evoke a personal, emotional response. Nix describes
her own work as "a careful balance between accident and discipline - a continuous dialogue between
my conscious mind and the unconscious. I court accident in order to let the unconscious do most
of the talking. The best paintings often happen quite magically with very little conscious
effort. It's an intuitive process, guided by years of experience, in which one thing simply
leads to another."
An only child growing up in an isolated environment, Nix set about at an early age to
innoculate herself from loneliness by creating in her own mind a secret world of beauty,
mystery, and magic. She was creating art by the age of three, and did her first oil painting
at age eleven - appropriately, a painting of a rose. Over the years she developed an unsurpassed
level of technical mastery of the traditional methods of painting. This mastery, along with her
rare creative gifts and her compulsive urge to explore, combine to create a uniquely rich visual
result - a magical reality.
Through her internationally successful program of limited edition prints, Nix has quickly
become one of the most "collectible" artists in the contemporary market. This series of limited
editions offers a broad sampling of Nix's widely ranging imagery, from her exquisite floral
studies, to her figurative painting and her ground-breaking "trellises." We invite you to
indulge in a visual feast - discover for yourself the magical world of Patricia Nix.