Nicole Storm

Nicole Storm has been working at Creative Growth for 27 years and has recently expanded her practice to include immersive site-specific installations. For Storm, the process of creation is paramount to the final painting. Storm doesn’t simply sit or stand while working—she walks the building, rides the elevator, and hides in corners, carrying her work around as she adds layers and detail to her paintings. This is a key component of her process, and its ambulatory nature functions as a way for her to gather and harvest visual information and work through her ideas. Although Storm is not performing for anyone, watching her work is akin to watching a contemporary performance piece; she hums, takes breaks to dance, engages others in conversation, and then suddenly decides to move her artwork and clipboard to another location. The peripatetic nature of her process is the work itself, and what we have are the remains.

Storm favors vibrant hues and likes to incorporate many layers of washes under and over her “notes.” She moves seamlessly between mark making with paint markers to painting with a brush, working and reworking the surface until she feels it is finished. As a natural progression of her creative process, Storm has begun directing the installation of her work for gallery exhibitions. Hanging work from the lighting grid, layering her paintings on the wall, spreading on the horizontal and vertical planes, and weaving everything together by painting on and around the works, her installations become active environments that continually evolve and become her new studio.

Storm’s latest exhibition at White Columns in New York was proclaimed one of the best gallery shows of 2021 by Roberta Smith in The New York Times.