White Room: Nikki Katsikas

White Columns is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by the Sea Cliff, Long Island-based artist Nikki Katsikas. Working in a slippery tradition of figurative painting that includes such maverick figures as Florine Stettheimer, Milton Avery, Alex Katz, David Hockney, or more recent exponents such as Elizabeth Peyton or Karen Kilimnik, Katsikas’s modestly scaled and highly idiosyncratic paintings describe a milieu that is at once deeply personal yet paradoxically universal. Working mostly with existing imagery – inc. photographs clipped from newspapers and magazines, movie stills, images from art history, and family snapshots – Katsikas’s subjects have included scenes from Renais’ ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ and Wes Anderson’s ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’, portraits of musicians Sly Stone and Elton John, to more elusive, common place images whose sources are less readily identifiable.
Nikki Katsikas lives and works in Sea Cliff, Long Island. She received a BFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 2008. Katsikas’s work was selected for Takashi Murakami’s 2008 Geisai Art Fair in Miami by jurors Bonnie Clearwater, Matthew Higgs, Shamim Momin, and Joao Ribas. She subsequently received the Geisai Award. Katsikas’s White Room will be her first solo gallery exhibition.