Nicole Wittenberg in Conversation with Jarrett Earnest

Join Nicole Wittenberg and Jarrett Earnest in conversation on the dynamics of image-making in painting and film.

Can we trace the root visual language of cinema back to painting? Nicole Wittenberg’s creative evolution has hinged on this question, and her singular body of work is the result. In conversation with writer and curator Jarrett Earnest, Wittenberg explores how cinema has shaped her painter’s eye — from the harvest scenes of Polanski’s Tess and the dreamlike reveries of Tarkovsky’s Solaris to Pasolini’s painterly La Ricotta. Drawing on influences like Breugel, Millet, and Pontormo, Wittenberg traces the dialogue between film and painting — how light becomes sensation, how a picture can make you feel the air around it, and how art captures what flickers between perception and emotion — to thrilling new terrain.

This year, Wittenberg’s work has been everywhere — in celebrated shows in Maine and Paris, earning praise for its “unabashed beauty.” Her work takes familiar subjects — flowers, skies, bodies, light — and renders them so immediate and charged that they feel newly discovered. She paints what can’t quite be seen: the shimmer of air, the temperature of color, the moment before something turns into memory.

Inspired by an interview between Wittenberg and Earnest for the artist’s first comprehensive monograph, published this summer by Monacelli Press, join us for a conversation coinciding with Nicole Wittenberg: All the Way, a solo exhibition featuring new and recent paintings at Acquavella Gallery in New York, on view now.