“Dancing on the Moon” will be the first in an ongoing series of exhibitions at WOLFS that will showcase the numerous and compelling chapters of Ken Nevadomi’s career. With few exceptions, the paintings in this exhibition have been locked away for decades, many coming directly from the artist’s studio. Dating from roughly 1986 to 1993, the paintings represent a mature phase of Nevadomi’s career, when the artist reassessed his direction, and chose to confront, head-on, one of his greatest heroes and inspirations: Pablo Picasso. He admired this “giant” for most of his life, having spent hours in front of Picasso’s majestic Blue Period masterpiece, La Vie, in the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art. For Nevadomi, this reverence for and study of the master manifested in a blue palette and the use of classicizing nudes set in otherworldly terrains. Another hallmark of this period is a technical experimentation with gritty paint additives including sand and plaster which he used to evoke stone an
