Nicholas Krushenick (May 31, 1929 – February 5, 1999) was an American abstract painter, collagist, and printmaker, widely recognized as the "father of Pop abstraction" for pioneering a distinctive style that merged elements of Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism, Color Field, and Abstract Expressionism.

Born in New York City, Krushenick studied at the Art Students League of New York and the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, supported by the GI Bill after serving in World War II. He began his career designing window displays and working at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1957, he co-founded the influential Brata Gallery in Manhattan’s East Village with his brother John, a hub for emerging artists including Yayoi Kusama and Al Held.

Krushenick developed his signature "pop abstract" style in the early 1960s, characterized by bold, hard-edged geometric forms, vibrant Liquitex colors, and strong black outlines. His work playfully referenced comic books and advertising while remaining non-representational. He gained prominence through solo exhibitions at major galleries like Graham, Fischbach, Pace, and Galerie Sonnabend, and was featured in landmark group shows such as Post-Painterly Abstraction (1964) and Documenta 4 (1968).

Despite his early fame, Krushenick withdrew from the New York art scene in the 1970s to become a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he taught from 1977 to 1991. He died of liver cancer in New York in 1999 at age 69. His work is held in over sixty major museum collections, including MoMA, the Whitney, and the Smithsonian, and has seen a resurgence in interest through posthumous exhibitions, including the 2015 retrospective Nicholas Krushenick: Electric Soup at Skidmore College.