It is not a generalization to say that Nikki Katsikas (b. 1985, New York) is inspired by everything. Celebrity portraits and personal memories are colorized and miniaturized in small canvases that reduce each image to its most vibrant, prescient details. Her renderings, which range from childlike to impressionistic, retrieve some of the curiosity and wonder still present in the world but so often lost in a jaded, image-saturated culture.

Having spent most of her career in the US Northeast, her prolific output is greatly influenced by four distinct seasons and the museums, landscapes, and celebrations that call the region home. Her structures and gestures have a storybook quality that exaggerates the things most lovely in her world: the intensity of a sunset reflected on the water, the zebra-patterned floorboards of a museum’s exhibition hall, the embrace of two lovers on a sunny day.

As the artist explains, “My paintings have always been inspired by images and articles I save from magazines and periodicals; I file them away until the artwork calls for it.”¹ In selecting subjects from her private archive, the artist presents history, both political and cultural, with a gentle domesticity that brings one back to the ephemeral sweetness of the moment itself. Her work plays with the traditional subjects and aesthetics of the Sunday afternoon painter, wherein politicians and fashion icons mingle in the same domestic landscapes as children and geese. Her interiors have a flat, comprehensive perspective that recalls both medieval tapestries and junior high art class.

Katsikas’s work is one of comfort, humor, and whimsy. Things may still go wrong in this world, but they do so in a way that’s manageable and off-canvas. Her treasured moments are the good things in life, scenes carefully selected and filed away for just the right moments—the times that they’re needed the most.

Note
1. “About,” accessed January 8, 2023, http://www.nikkikatsikas.com/about.