“A painting can look beautiful and have power, can look ugly and have power, and can look awkward and have power – all three of them can have that quality, whether they’re beautiful, ugly, or awkward. And that’s the real key. So even if you use beauty and power, it always has to have power, visual power anyhow. And even if the visual power is a minimal idea it’s still a power. In other words, if it looks bland that was the idea. But in its blandness it had better have some kind of impact.”

-Nicholas Krushenick

About the Artist

Nicholas Krushenick (May 31, 1929 – February 5, 1999) was an American abstract painter, collagist and printmaker whose mature artistic style straddled Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism and Color Field. He was active in the New York art scene from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, before he began focusing his time as a professor at the University of Maryland. Initially experimenting with a more derivative Abstract Expressionist style, by the mid-1960s he had developed his own unique approach, painting increasingly decisive compositions marked by bold, colorful, geometric fields and forms simultaneously flattened and amplified by strong black outlines, in a style that eventually became known as Pop abstraction.

In 1984, the biographical dictionary World Artists, 1950-1980 observed that Krushenick "has been called the only truly abstract Pop painter."[1] Today, as other artists have been carefully folded into the same paradoxical genre, Krushenick is not only considered a singular figure within that style but also its pioneer, earning him the title "the father of Pop abstraction.