Opening Thursday, September 4 at Nancy Hoffman Gallery is an exhibition titled Water ways, featuring works on paper by artist Nicole Phungrasamee Fein, on view through October 18, 2025.

The exhibition includes drawings from 2014 to 2025, varying in medium and scale, almost all black and white, with a few staccato notes of white gold. Each is an exploration of working with and looking at water. Over the years Fein has distilled her imagery following her quiet yet profound voice. Radically suspending a fleeting moment, each work is an object of contemplation. It may be a circle emerging as a mirage-like planet born from a drop of water or a skyscape drawn one tiny dot at a time. A wave’s edge on sand may become an aerial coastline or a mountain skyline. Each a quiet meditation.

Art critic Jeff Kelley writes, “As an artist, Fein follows finely ground black materials like graphite, iron oxide, ink, and watercolor as they compose themselves into squares on white paper and paperboard into the visual equivalents of drizzles, sediment, pools, and fog. In a sense, they have weather. Metaphors of the mind (stormy, misty, unpredictable, disoriented), their weather are also literal acts of drawing. The artist calls them ‘water drawings.’ ... This is classic American minimalism, not because it is visually spare (although it is), but because there is no real distance between the noun and the verb – a pool pools, drizzles drizzle, drips drip, fog fogs. The object is the image is the material is the act.”

The drawings evoke natural phenomena and the unseen forces of creation. The challenge of articulating the present moment drives the work while the passage of time is drawn out. The viewer is invited to experience the work of a penetrating, quiet soul with a consistently evolving vision over the years. An invitation well worth accepting.