Peter Nadin’s exhibition, “The Distance from a Lemon to Murder,” is on view at Off Paradise until June 23.

The painter Peter Nadin was born in 1954 near Liverpool, the son of a sea captain whose family roots stretch back centuries in northwest England. Nadin studied art at Newcastle University and moved to New York in 1976, a time of deep, consequential flux in the city’s art world, when the dominant movements of Minimalism and Conceptualism were giving way to new forms of experimentation, including a rebirth of interest in painting. Nadin plugged almost immediately into a downtown art scene that included young peers like Christopher D’Arcangelo, Daniel Buren, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Weiner. Along with D’Arcangelo he founded the collaborative art site 84 West Broadway, an anti-gallery exhibition space located in his own Tribeca loft, in 1978. And he later became a founder of an unlikely artists’ collective called The Offices of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin, Prince & Winters, whose members—including Peter Fend, Colleen Fitzgibbon, and Robin Winters—offered up their talents as critical thinkers to solve real-world problems for clients. It was a social-practice practice many years (too many years, as it turned out) ahead of its time. 

When I first met Nadin, in 2011, at the insistence of the gallery owner Gavin Brown, a fellow Brit, he had already become something of a myth, having dropped completely out of the commercial art world for almost twenty years. He had become dissatisfied with the machinery of galleries and the limitations it imposed on his work. Instead of showing, he simply kept painting, mostly on a farm that he and his wife, the entrepreneur Anne Kennedy, had bought in the Catskills. Nadin also taught for many years at Cooper Union, and became deeply involved in the life of his farm and of the people who lived around it. I first visited him there to write a profile for The New York Times Magazine. The conversations that began then have continued with some frequency for more than a decade now, mostly in the summers, in the Catskills, looking at paintings, sculpture, plants, animals, mountains, ponds, and sky. After many years of rebuilding his thinking about painting through cycles of conceptual work, Nadin recently returned to what he called “painting from life,” the works heavily grounded in the greenhouse and immediate environs, much of the painting done during a concentrated period of pandemic isolation. A selection of the paintings is the subject of an exhibition now on view at Off Paradise gallery in Tribeca, titled “The Distance from a Lemon to Murder,” open through June 23. Nadin and I recently sat down in the living room of his home in the West Village to pick up the thread once again.  Read More