Foray
"it’s all so impossibly laid before us"
Since it’s the last week of Foray, the inaugural exhibition of the Albuquerque Abstract Artists Alliance at Fusion 708, I’m sharing a blurb I wrote about what Nicky Kurland’s art means to me. If you have a chance, do yourself a favor and check out the exhibit before it closes on November 2. I was moved by all the talent featured in the gallery.
Our inner lives are endlessly melting into the world beyond us, but there is a painful separation between the two, emulating oil and water. No less natural than night swallowing the day, the swirling chaos and beauty, comfort and pain, creation and destruction - it’s all so impossibly laid before us. Here we stand with nothing but our bodies and an invention we call language to make any sense of the contradictions of existence. That is why we have abstract art. To take what cannot be seen or said and make it colorful, textured, touchable, loud, unbearably real and in demand of reckoning. That is what I have found in the work of Nicole Kurland.
“Making art is my way of responding to the world around me, be it nature, politics, mystery, love,” says Kurland, whose friends call her Nicky. “Abstract art challenges me to find my expression and my voice, and create a work that includes the principles of art…without a point of reference.”
Nicky has made art her whole life but only in her 70s is starting to share her work in galleries. There is poetry in her plain spoken way of talking about her art, saying what it is she means with a lived-in kindness that grows from a generous and genuine curiosity in people. “Making abstract art is a connection between heart and brain. It forces you to think hard and deeply, to put it aside and to come back until it is right… The closest thing I can use to describe it is that it is like solving a puzzle, or a mathematical equation.”
In her paintings, drawings, monotypes, encaustics, and digital art, Nicky’s work celebrates the natural world, protests injustice, evokes the calm power of night and the fleeting nature of our days, shares the fruits of the desert riverside bosque, and channels the wild and unencumbered lives of animals. But even more often, these concrete figures of our day-to-day line of sight are absent, replaced by something that could otherwise only visit you if your thoughts were free of words and your vision was smeared into elemental colors and shapes. “It comes from deep within, so it’s like sharing a piece of your heart,” Nicky says. “Can’t you see color, composition, movement, balance… without something identifiable or representational?”
After devoting her career to graphic design and teaching kids, Nicky now lives in Corrales, NM with her wife Julie and their three dogs, Stella, Milo, and Indigo. You can find Nicky’s art at Fusion 708 from October 3 - November 2, 2025.