Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Drawing, watercolor
Website: nicolephungrasameefein.com
Nicole Phungrasamee Fein was born in 1974 in Evanston, Illinois, and grew up in Santa Barbara, California. She received a BA from Tufts University, a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. As an undergraduate, she spent a summer at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou studying traditional Chinese ink techniques and calligraphy, an experience that led her to adopt watercolor as her lifelong medium. She lives and works in San Francisco and is represented by Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco, Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York, Devin Borden Gallery in Houston, Galerie Dittmar in Berlin, and Patrick Heide Contemporary Art in London. Her work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Achenbach Foundation), the Berkeley Art Museum, the Menil Drawing Institute, the Hammer Museum, the Blanton Museum, the Fogg Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, among others.
Fein makes meticulous, process-oriented watercolor drawings — always on paper, always in square or circular formats — using a technique she calls “speckle”: an extremely controlled method of applying veils of translucent color in sequential layers, thousands upon thousands of marks, with no guiding line. Critics frequently describe the works as elegant, serene, and ethereal, noting a productive tension between the rigorous, systematic process and the shimmering, meditative beauty of the outcome. The Artforum critic Elliott Zooey Martin compared her to Agnes Martin: “interested in the meditative calm afforded by a serial process… the drawings are acutely alive.” Her early works built weave-like patterns in earth tones; a distinctive shift toward vibrant, spectrum-like color arrived around fifteen years ago. More recently, she has allowed water itself to carry the pigment — drizzle, pooling, rivulets, fog — surrendering some control to the behavior of the medium.
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