Barbara Nessim

Malin Gallery is pleased to present Stargirl, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, ceramics and digital works by the New York-based artist Barbara Nessim. With a body of work stretching over six decades, Barbara Nessim is widely acclaimed as both a fine artist and a commercial artist. In the early 1960s, Nessim was one of the first women to thrive as an illustrator in the New York magazine industry, and she is now recognized as one of the most influential illustrators of the late twentieth century. Her fine art has been shown internationally since the 1970s, including a major retrospective at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2013. Nessim was also one of the first artists to begin producing digital art, and she later pioneered the field of generative digital design. Three of Nessim's early digital artworks are included in Stargirl as unique NFTs.

Stargirl features fourteen large-scale paintings from a new series of work, The Wo/men In My Life, inspired by drawings from Nessim’s daily sketchbooks from the 1970s. The new paintings are accompanied by selections from several of bodies of work stretching back to the 1960s, including works on paper, ceramics and early digital art.

Barbara Nessim (born 1939, Bronx, NY) is a New York based artist and illustrator whose career spans six decades. Her practice encompasses fine art and illustration—constantly challenging and subverting the perceived separation between the fields. In the early 1960s, Nessim was one of the first full-time professional women illustrators working in the United States. She produced designs for many top publications including The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Time, New York and Esquire. Nessim began to teach illustration at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York in 1967. She subsequently served as the Chairperson of Illustration at Parsons School of Design for over a decade. Nessim was awarded the Pratt Lifetime Achievement Award and was recently inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. At the dawn of the computer age, Nessim was one of the first artists of note to begin using the computer as an artistic tool. She taught in the first Master’s degree program in digital illustration at SVA and fostered widespread adoption of digital technologies as the Chairperson of Illustration at Parsons School of Design.

Nessim’s artworks have been broadly shown at institutions including The Louvre, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Smithsonian and The Bard Center. The Victoria & Albert Museum in London mounted a major retrospective in 2013, entitled Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life. Nessim’s work is held in the permanent collections of major institutions, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Victoria & Albert Museum, The Szépmüvészeti Museum (Budapest), The Museum of Modern Art (Lund, Sweden) and The Smithsonian (Washington, DC).