TUCKER NICHOLS

“The notebook that I keep in my pocket—anything can happen in there. It feels like, ‘Yeah, you can be organised, you can do that here, but let’s not get too organised. You might miss something.’”

Tucker Nichols is best known for his smartly funny drawings and large-scale gallery installations. Nichols often takes inspiration from found objects and from the surroundings of his studio in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Nichols’s work has been featured in museums and galleries around the country and in Europe, and his drawings have been published in McSweeney’s, The Thing Quarterly, and the opinion pages of the New York Times.

For Plumb, Nichols has been able to explore his love of paper notebooks as well as the freedom and serendipity they offer, supporting his own spontaneous creative process. “I find my favorite drawings of the day are typically the ones that I make when it’s time to leave and there’s still some paint left,” he observes. “I might as well clean it up by just using a big brush and getting the paint onto some paper to see what comes out.”

As long as paper and pens exist in the world, Nichols plans to keep on creating.

Plumb Notebooks

• Explorer Notebook
• Tangle Notebook

Solo exhibitions

• ZieherSmith Gallery, New York, NY
• Gallery 16, San Francisco, CA
• Lincart, San Francisco, CA
• Brattleboro Museum of Art, Brattleboro, VT
• Kunstpanorama, Luzern, Switzerland

Group exhibitions

• Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
• Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA
• SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA
• Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA
• Den Frie Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark