Nicole Phungrasamee Fein

Water Ways

September 4 – October 18, 2025

Opening Thursday, September 4 at Nancy Hoffman Gallery is an exhibition titled Water Ways, featuring works on paper by artist Nicole Phungrasamee Fein, on view through October 18, 2025.

The exhibition includes drawings from 2014 to 2025, varying in medium and scale, almost all black and white, with a few staccato notes of white gold. Each is an exploration of working with and looking at water. Over the years Fein has distilled her imagery following her quiet yet profound voice. Radically suspending a fleeting moment, each work is an object of contemplation. It may be a circle emerging as a mirage-like planet born from a drop of water or a skyscape drawn one tiny dot at a time. A wave’s edge on sand may become an aerial coastline or a mountain skyline. Each a quiet meditation.

Art critic Jeff Kelley writes, “As an artist, Fein follows finely ground black materials like graphite, iron oxide, ink, and watercolor as they compose themselves into squares on white paper and paperboard into the visual equivalents of drizzles, sediment, pools, and fog. In a sense, they have weather. Metaphors of the mind (stormy, misty, unpredictable, disoriented), their weather are also literal acts of drawing. The artist calls them ‘water drawings.’ … This is classic American minimalism, not because it is visually spare (although it is), but because there is no real distance between the noun and the verb – a pool pools, drizzles drizzle, drips drip, fog fogs. The object is the image is the material is the act.”

The drawings evoke natural phenomena and the unseen forces of creation. The challenge of articulating the present moment drives the work while the passage of time is drawn out. The viewer is invited to experience the work of a penetrating, quiet soul with a consistently evolving vision over the years. An invitation well worth accepting.

About the Artist:

Nicole Phungrasamee Fein was born in Evanston, Illinois (1974) and grew up in Santa Barbara, California. She currently lives and works in San Francisco, California. She attended Tufts University (BA), the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (BFA), and Mills College, Oakland, CA (MFA). Fein’s work has been exhibited at Mills College Art Museum; the de Young Museum; the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco; the San Jose Museum of Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) at UC Berkeley; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Katonah Museum of Art; Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco; Devon Borden Gallery in Houston; and Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York, among others.

Her work is included in the collections of the Achenbach Foundation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA); The Blanton Museum of Art at University of Texas; the Fogg Museum / Harvard Art Museums; the Hammer Museum at UCLA; Menil Drawing Institute; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.