Nancy Lorenz is a New York-based artist who makes objects of incandescent beauty. Her practice deconstructs modernist methods and transforms traditional materials. 

The Elements

As a series, Lorenz’s Table of Elements make manifest the intersection of art and alchemy—the painter as sorcerer’s apprentice. It is replete also with references to the painter’s true apprenticeship, beginning in adolescence, when Lorenz moved with her parents from Texas to Tokyo.

The family’s first address was the Okura Hotel, an icon of Japanese modernism built in the early 1960s. Lorenz recalls her first impressions: the highly formal flower arrangements and the muted glow of the traditional paper screens. While she credits this time in Tokyo with her decision to become an artist, other sources would prove equally influential. A year spend studying in Italy after graduate school awakened an appreciation of late medieval and Renaissance gold ground painting, together with the Italian variant of Minimalism and Conceptualism that the critic Germano Celant termed arte povera.     

Now at mid-career, Lorenz’s aesthetic may finally be closest to that of the 16th-century Momayama period, marked by the coexistence of two aesthetic ideals: on the one hand, the gorgeousness of the samurai’s mansion, and on the other hand, in the shadows of this luxury, the austere simplicity of the teahouse.

In 2015 Nancy Lorenz began a series of paintings inspired by the periodic table of elements. The project was distinguished by its systematic approach, resting on research and experimentation.

Some of the elements were relatively unfamiliar: lutetium, for instance, a rare earth discovered in 1907. Others, such as gold and platinum, required no introduction—least of all to those familiar with Lorenz’s work. Au79 Gold, a painting on burlap, is exemplary of the artist’s Zen-inflected sensibility. Not a painting in the usual sense, the work is predicated on a technique—water gilding—more commonly associated with a picture’s frame. The composition, a gestural combination of closed forms, is raised on the rough burlap. In contrast to the coarse, open weave of the ground, water gilding gives the circular figures the luster of solid gold. 

As Lorenz explains:

The table of elements was the perfect metaphor to allow me to explore and organize my interest in materials. It allowed me to experiment. I went through the elements and interpreted them in sometimes-poetic ways. It was important that the painting work on an abstract level, incorporating the wide array of art historical references that I had picked up along the way, and yet still had a concrete physical reference. In the case of Au79 Gold and Ag47 Silver, the metals are used more literally. But Pd46 Palladium, for instance, includes flocking on velvet.

Recent Work

Nancy Lorenz

Nancy Lorenz is a visual artist and John Simon Guggenheim Fellow who lives and works in New York City. She earned her BFA in Painting and Printmaking at the University of Michigan and her MFA in Painting at the Tyler School of Art. Her work has been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries, including a mid-career retrospective at the San Diego Museum of Art in 2018. Lorenz’s most recent exhibitions were at ADAA The Art Show (New York), Gavlak Gallery (Palm Beach), PDX Contemporary Art (Portland), and a 2023 site-specific installation at Chiesa degli Artisti (The Church of the Artists) in Rome. She frequently collaborates with leading international architects and designers including William Georgis, Peter Marino, Michael Smith, and William Sofield. Lorenz’s work can be seen in public spaces around the world—including Chanel, Dior, and Tiffany’s stores—as well as in numerous private collections. An upcoming exhibition at the Taubman Art Museum in 2027 will feature the artist’s ongoing exploration of the periodic table of elements.