Nathan Redwood is an American painter born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1978. His experimental style of painting is notable for luminous brushstrokes over large-scale fictional landscapes that transform into constructed figurative allegories. This unique combination, often laden with art symbolism, was a precursor to the current figure painting revival that began in the early 2000s. Acknowledged or not, his influence can be seen in American painting today.

Redwood’s first California solo exhibition in 2006, Construction Under the Sun at Carl Berg gallery, marked his emergence on the Los Angeles art scene. The artist became known for his early images that evolved a transparent serpentine brushmark that connected abstract systems to landscape, object, architecture, and figuration. His backgrounds were often large color fields of transparent teals, burnt reds and chalky yellow ochres, referencing his southwestern roots. Many early works, such as Snap (2006), Mighty Mud (2007), and 3000 (2008), explored huge volumetric gestures as wide as a foot, dislodging themselves from their earth-like moorings into figurative form. They swept across his canvases in a howl against environmental depravity, and presaged a forthcoming age of anxiety in turbulent compositions.

Redwood is drawn to the abstract gesture, the line, insofar as it characterizes the energy and mood of his storytelling within a composition. Atop the backgrounds of his gestural color fields that define the dynamics of his paintings, he builds roughly hewn quotidian objects and studio materials in a stacked manner much like outdoor sculpture, reflecting a surreal Baroque sensibility. These inventive contraptions assert both hopeful and chaotic upheaval and have a feel of Rube Goldberg or Jean Tinguely machines. Like his palette, these elements reference the sunbelt region, the bric-a-brac and waste bringing to mind detritus along freeways, deserted ranches, and ghost towns. The action painting and construction element, in both painting investigations and building materials as subject, suggest a working class upbringing that pairs labor to the act of painting.

Redwood’s work is celebrated for its multifaceted approach to the canvas. Weaving in and out of his own figure painting personalities, he offers many alternatives to the endless waves of American abstraction, which have been appropriately coined ‘zombie formalism.’ The artist wholly believes this formalism is heavily forced on the young American artist, disallowing their imaginative potential to thrive, causing a pseudo-transcendent cycle to repeat itself. He believes American progress in painting has stalled as a result. In nearly twenty public exhibitions, Redwood has shown a clear opposition to an abstract or meditative approach to painting. His painterly energy and output are concerned with worldly change, environmental change and contemporary society.

His early hybrid approach to painting used abstraction against itself, to tether representational form back to the canvas, building critical narrative into painting at a time when it was sorely lacking in America. Over the past decade the general consciousness in America has been fraught with social and political upheaval. The artist has used this time to further transform his personal iconography with more relatable human characteristics. These new figures reveal subtle physical incongruities and indistinct occupations in setups probing art history and contemporary life. From this evolution, a contemplative stillness has emerged, and a more nuanced and consequential figure painting is once again beginning to unfold in his work.

Nathan Redwood earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, followed by residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. He  moved to Los Angeles in late 2005. He has exhibited at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, California, the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, TENT Centrum Beeldende Kunst, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California, the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, California, the Rollins Arts Museum, Winter Park, Florida, the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum, Mesa, Arizona, and currently at the Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona.