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Nicola Tyson: Selected Paintings 1993-2022 is the first comprehensive monograph of paintings by British-born, New York-based artist Nicola Tyson (b. 1960). Tyson’s figurative works focus on the female body – presenting recognisable forms through an abstracted lens that morphs her subjects into fluid, dreamlike characters. This catalogue documents the evolution of Tyson’s unique painterly language over the course of three decades, featuring over 50 artworks interwoven with a series of photographs taken of Tyson in the studio and on her farm in upstate New York. Also featured is an essay by Jennifer Higgie that discusses Tyson’s feminist-informed approach to figurative painting, looking to her formative years running the queer experimental project space Trial BALLOON in New York during the 1990s, right up to the present day.

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Nicola Tyson was born and raised in London and studied art at Central Saint Martins in the 1980s. While pursuing her foundation courses in the late 1970s, Tyson frequented a small bar named Billy's where she photographed the burgeoning New Romantic's club scene. The scene's flamboyant post-punk attitude has forever influenced the vibrant colors, fashion conscious composition and non-binary abstracted figuration in her paintings that she has become known for after relocating to New York City in the 1990s. Tyson's subject matter has always been infused with an imaginative feminism that can be described as finding her own voice emancipated from theory. In the early 1990s, she opened a women's-only gallery, Trial BALLOON, that went on to launch the careers of Lutz Bacher and Nicole Eisenman. Her book of autobiographical missives to dead male artists, Dead Letter Men, emphasized her wry humor and feminist criticality to this day imbues her radical figuration. Tyson's drawings and paintings show two sides of her practice. Her graphite works on paper are often completed in one sitting much like a surrealist automatic drawing. The paintings take on a slower approach. The artist lays down gesture in Zen-like strokes upon the canvas. Tyson's dry-brush style (where the acrylic is applied slightly dry to create a specialized impasto) often show radiating energy that gives life to her solitary figures and botanicals. Nicola Tyson's paintings, drawings, and sculpture have been the subject of two survey exhibitions: Kunsthalle Zurich (1998) and The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2017). She is represented by Petzel, New York; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles and Brussels. Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer who lives in London. Previously the editor of frieze magazine and the presenter of Bow Down, a podcast about women in art history, she is the author and illustrator of the children's book There's Not One; the editor of The Artist's Joke and author of the novel Bedlam. Her books The Mirror & The Palette: Rebellion, Resilience and Resistance: 500 Years of Women's Self Portraits (2021) and The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit (2023) are published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. She also writes screenplays. Jennifer has been a judge of the Paul Hamlyn Award, the Turner Prize, the John Moore's Painting Prize, and a member of the advisory boards of Arts Council England, the British Council Venice Biennale Commission, the Contemporary Art Society and the Imperial War Museum Art Commissions.

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