FERNBERGER

Massimo De Carlo gallery and Fondation Le Corbusier continue their art–architecture conversation with a vibrant new show by Nicole Wittenberg.

Nicole Wittenberg’s new suite of paintings at Paris’s Maison La Roche vitalizes Le Corbusier’s purist vision with burstsof color and gesture.

On view through July 19, 2025, “Ain’t Misbehavin’” emerges from a flourishing collaboration between Massimo De Carlo and Fondation Le Corbusier, advancing the ongoing dialogue between art and architecture since 2022.

Drawing on a range of historical traditions from the Venetians to the Fauves, Wittenberg’s painterly practice begins with
plein air studies, which then undergo a series of transformations in the studio.

In this series, the artist has eliminated the sense of depth that characterized her previous floral and landscape works, choosing instead to depict the giant blossoms as though they are pressing up against the picture plane. This deft
imposition of rectilinearity onto an exuberance of saturated, organic forms brings the work into dialogue with its sleek, rationalist architectural setting.
In today’s high-pressure world, this pictorial strategy also evokes other, more insidious structures of containment and control bearing down on nature, freedom of movement, and the creative spirit—forces that nonetheless continue to resist subdual.

Born in San Francisco in 1979, Nicole Wittenberg studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and received the John Koch Award for Best Young Figurative Painter from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012. Since then, Wittenberg has exhibited widely, with recent solo shows at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine and Fernberger Gallery in Los Angeles as well as at Massimo De Carlo’s galleries in Milan and London. Her work has been accessioned into the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, and the Albertina in Vienna, among others. She lives and works in New York.

Designed in 1923–25 by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret for the Swiss banker and art collector Raoul La Roche, Maison La Roche is recognized as a Modern masterwork and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It houses Fondation Le
Corbusier and the world’s largest collection of the architect’s drawings, paintings, and plans. Juxtaposing Wittenberg’s vibrant, expressive florals with the disciplined lines of Le Corbusier’s Modernist design accentuates the creative vision of each respectively, and ultimately highlighting the value and revelation that can be achieved through curation that incorporates the architecture in which visual art is staged.

Nicole Wittenberg’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” is on view at Maison La
Roche, Paris, through July 19, 2025