GALLERY PETER BLUM
JOHN ZURIER PETER BLUM GALLERY
JOHN ZURIER
Born 1956 in Santa Monica, CA Lives and works in Berkeley, CA and Reykjavik, Iceland
EDUCATION
1974 – 1984 University of California at Berkeley BA 1979 in Landscape Architecture; MFA 1984 in Painting
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2019 North from Here, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY Places and Things, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, Sweden 2018 Etchings and Monotypes, Borch Gallery, Berlin, Germany A Mind of Winter, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin, Germany Sometimes (Over me the mountain), BERG Contemporary, Reykjavík, Iceland 2017 Stars Without Distance, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY At the very end of the blue sky, The Club, Tokyo, Japan John Zurier, Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger, Norway Dust and Troubled Air, Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2016 The Last Summer Light, Office Baroque, Brussels, Belgium John Zurier: Summer Book, Niels Borch Jensen, Berlin, Germany John Zurier and Friends, Crown Point Press, San Francisco, CA Recent Watercolors, Lawrence Markey, San Antonio, Texas East, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin, Germany 2015 John Zurier: Watercolors, Galleri Gangur (The Corridor), Reykjavik, Iceland Between North and Night, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, Sweden West of the Future, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY 2014 John Zurier: Matrix 255, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA Recent Paintings, Lawrence Markey, San Antonio, TX 2013 Knowledge is a blue naiveté, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin, Germany A spring a thousand years ago, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY John Zurier: Watercolors, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA John Zurier, Peter Blum Gallery, ADAA Art Show, New York, NY 2012 John Zurier: Paintings, Patrick De Brock Gallery, Knokke-Heist, Belgium John Zurier Paintings 1998-2012, The 30th Sao Paulo Biennial: The Imminence of Poetics, Sao Paulo, Brazil 2011 John Zurier: Paintings and Watercolors, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA 2010 John Zurier: White Paintings and Night Paintings, Peter Blum Chelsea, New York, NY Nordic Paintings, Galería Javier López, Madrid, Spain 2009 John Zurier / John Beech, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA 2008 John Zurier: Night Paintings, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA, 2007 John Zurier: Paintings, Galería Javier López, Madrid, Spain John Zurier: Paintings, Peter Blum SoHo, New York, NY
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2005 John Zurier: New Paintings, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA John Zurier: New Paintings, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA 2003 John Zurier, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA John Zurier: Oblaka, Peer, London, UK 2002 Broken Fragments: New Monotypes on Linen and Paper, Aurobora Press, San Francisco, CA 2001 John Zurier, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA John Zurier, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA 2000 John Zurier: Paintings 1997-1999, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA (catalogue with interview with Lawrence Rinder) 1999 John Zurier: Monotypes, Aurobora Press, San Francisco, CA 1994 John Zurier: Abstract Paintings, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA 1990 John Zurier: Monotypes, Concourse Gallery, Bank of America World Headquarters, San Francisco, CA 1989 John Zurier: New Paintings, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA 1986 John Zurier, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA 1985 John Zurier, Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA 1984 John Zurier, Dana Reich Gallery, San Francisco, CA John Zurier, Sun Gallery, Hayward, CA
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2020 Silence Is So Accurate, Geukens & De Vil, Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium 2019 Gesture, Crown Point Press Gallery, San Francisco, CA Group Exhibition, BORCHs Butik, Copenhagen, Denmark 2018 George's First Print Show, George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA Blå (Blue), BORCHs Butik, Copenhagen, Denmark Black & White, Crown Point Press Gallery, San Francisco, California Kind of Blue – Winter Exhibition, Crown Point Press Gallery, San Francisco, California In Series: Contemporary Drawings from the Collection, SF MOMA, San Francisco, CA 2017 Degrees of Abstraction, Crown Point Press Gallery, San Francisco, CA Group Exhibition, BORCHs Butik, Copenhagen, Denmark #currentmood, Berg Contemporary, Reykjavik, Iceland SottoPelle (under the skin), Galleria Annarumma, Naples, Italy THE STAND, P! Gallery, New York, NY 2016 Traces of Water, Hafnarbjörg, Hafnarfjörður, Iceland Be With Me, a Small Exhibition of Large Painting, New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM Once we were next door neighbours, Hreinn Fridfinnsson and John Zurier, Listasafn ASI, Reykjavik, Iceland 2015 A Studio in Iceland, Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Retrospective”, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA Paper Trail: Contemporary Prints, Drawings, and Photographs from the Collection, Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME 2014 Group Exhibition: The Sea, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA …And Color, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA 2012 30th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil Heat Waves, Peter Blum Chelsea, New York, NY
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Drawing a Line in the Sand, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY 2011 John Zurier, Jason Fox, Richard Allen Morris, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY Absence/Presence: Contemporary Abstraction, Art Gallery, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA El Genet Blau (The Blue Rider), JiM Contemporani, Barcelona, Spain Life of the World to Come: Twist and Shout, NIAD Gallery, Richmond, CA 2010 Black and White, Jason McCoy Gallery, New York, NY California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA Le Tableau, Cheim and Read Gallery, New York, NY ARRAY ( [ + ] PRINTS ), Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA Informal Relations: Contemporary works on paper, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art - iMOCA, Indianapolis, IN Jack Davidson, Laurie Reid, John Zurier, Pulliam Gallery, Portland, OR Rare and Unreleased, NIAD Gallery, Richmond, CA 2009 Diminuendo & Crescendo: Small Works Exhibition, San Francisco Studio School Gallery, San Francisco, CA Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA TRANSformal, Pharmaka, Los Angeles, CA Luminous Room, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA Evergreen: Green Paintings, George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA Trans: Form/Color, Meridian Gallery, San Francisco, CA John Beech & John Zurier, Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco, CA Monochrome, Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, OH 2008 Pintura Abstracta, Galeria Javier López, Madrid, Spain Surface and Substance, San Francisco Studio School Gallery, San Francisco, CA To Be Looked At, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA To: Night, Times Square Gallery, Hunter College Art Galleries, New York, NY, in conjunction with “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea 2007 X-Tra:Kunstler der Galerie, Galerie Clause Smerak, Munich, Germany CCA: 100 Years of the Making, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA Color/Construction: John Zurier / Tomas Vinson, Wade Wilson Art, Houston, TX Trans: Abstraction, Weltraum, Munich, Germany Contemporary Art: Gifts from the Alex Katz Foundation, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, MA Selections from the Concrete, H. Paxton Moore Fine Art Gallery, El Centro College, Dallas, TX 2006 The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, New Langton Arts, San Francisco, CA Line and Surface: Works on Paper, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY Close Proximity: Works of Intimate Scale, Wade Wilson Art, Houston, TX Some Light, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA Introductions, Wade Wilson Art, Houston, TX 2005 A Motion Picture: Videos by 18 Artists, De Young Museum, San Francisco, CA Bay Area Bazaar, Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery, Portland, OR 2004 Specific Light, Eugene Binder Gallery, Marfa, TX
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Array, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA Turning Corners, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA Gallery Artists, Chac Mool Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2003 Exodus: Between Promise and Fulfillment, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK Paintings, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA 2002 John Zurier, Robert Ryman, Joseph Marioni: Painting, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA Painted Color, Chac Mool Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Whitney Biennial 2002, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY XXL, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA 2001 (Some) Prints, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA Minimalism: Then and Now, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA Selected Artists, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA 1999 A Quiet Storm, Kohn Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Paintings, Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston, TX Beholding Beauty, Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA 1998 Undercurrents and Overtones: Contemporary Abstract Painting, Oliver Art Center, California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA Paintings, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA Practice and Process: New Painterly Abstraction in California, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena and the Richmond Art Center, Richmond, CA 1996 Abstraction Absolved: Ten Bay-Area Painters, Mills College Art Gallery, Oakland, CA New Talent, New Ideas, Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY Paintings, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA Three Painters: Anne Appleby, Gregg Renfrow, John Zurier, Arts Benicia Center, Benicia, CA 1993 Drawing First, Southern Exposure Gallery at Project Artaud, San Francisco, CA Recent Paintings: Donald Feasel, Philip Morsberger, John Zurier, Shasta College Gallery, Redding, CA Artists’ Self-Portraits in Black and White by Eighty-six West Coast Artists, Edith Caldwell Gallery, San Francisco, CA Chad Buck, Dan Connally, John Zurier, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA 1992 Three Painters: Donald Feasel, Philip Morsberger, John Zurier, ProArts Gallery, Oakland, CA Drawing Room, Nexus, Berkeley, CA 1990 Chain Reaction Six, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco, CA Fifteen Artists of Gallery Paule Anglim, Shasta College Gallery, Redding, CA 1989 Invitation Print Exhibition, NIAD Gallery, Richmond, CA 1988 Sixteen Young Bay Area Artists, Colorado State University Art Gallery, Fort Collins, CO 1986 Monotypes: Garner Tullis Workshop, Pace Editions, New York, NY Garner Tullis Workshop, Gallery au Poisson Rouge, Praz/Vully, Switzerland Expressive Abstraction, Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA Gallery Artists, Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA ProArts Annual, ProArts Gallery, Oakland, CA
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The Art of Collaboration: Monotypes from the Studio of Garner Tullis, California State University, San Bernadino, CA; traveled to Western Washington State University Art Gallery Teachers and Pupils, Anna Gardner Gallery, Stinson Beach, CA 1984 Three Pick Four, University of California, San Francisco, CA MFA/UCB/1984, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA 1983 Hayward Area Forum of the Arts Annual, Centennial Hall, Hayward, CA 1980 Paintings and Drawings, Phillippe Bonnafont Gallery, San Francisco, CA
MONOTYPE PROJECTS
1998 and 2002 Aurobora Press, San Francisco, CA 1989 and 1990 Garner Tullis Workshop, Santa Barbara, CA 1984 and 1986 Garner Tullis Workshop, Emeryville, CA
AWARDS AND TEACHING
2019 Honoree at the Hirshhorn New York Gala Artist x Artist 2010 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship 2006 – Present Distinguished Professor, California College of the Arts
SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, ME Microsoft Corporation Art Collection, Redmond, WA Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA University of California, San Francisco Art Collection, San Francisco, CA Principia College, Elsah, IL
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
2019 Clark, Andy Martinelli. “CRITICS’ PICKS: John Zurier”, Artforum (online), October 10, 2019 Lindman, Erik. “John Zurier with Erik Lindman,” The Brooklyn Rail, October 2, 2019 2018 Horne, Stephen. “The Personality of Abstraction,” Border Crossings, September/October Issue 2018
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Sauer, Jennifer. “Light & Memory: An Interview with John Zurier,” ArtDependence Magazine (online), May 3, 2018 Stopa, Jason. “Ambiguity as Strength: A Conversation with John Zurier,” Art in America (online), April 5, 2018 Westfall, Stephen. “Slow Painting”, Art in America, February 2018 2017 Cohen, David, moderator. “The Review Panel,” artcritical.com, episode 87, November 16, 2017 Smith, Roberta. “Weekend Arts | Galleries,” The New York Times, October 27, 2017 Pobric, Pac. “Private View,” The Art Newspaper, October 1 Kotz, Genevieve. “NYC Gallery Scene – Highlights Through October 1, 2017,” Hampton Arts Hub, September 26 Cascone, Sarah. “Editors’ Picks: 16 Things to See in New York This Week,” Artnet, September 25 Sunnana, Arnhild. “John Zurier – en kunstner vi vil se mer av!” Contemporary Art Stavanger, April 4 Borgen, Trond. “Colour as Optical Sponge,” Stavanger Aftenblad, April 18 Roth, David M. “John Zurier @ Anglim Gilbert,” Square Cylinder, May 31 “Við vorum einu sinni nágrannar - John Zurier og Hreinn Friðfinnsson,” art*zine, June 27 2016 “Fjölbreytt myndlistar- og hönnunardagskrá á Listahátíð í Reykjavík,” Listahátíð 2016, May 9 Chan, Dawn. “Land of Plenty: Reykjavik,” Artforum, June 5 Jóhannsdóttir, Anna. “Af góðum grönnum,” Morgunblaðið, June 23 “Datebook: John Zurier’s New Exhibition at Crown Point Press Gallery,” Blouin ArtInfo, September 6 Brown, Kathan. “John Zurier,” Overview, Fall Jadrnak, Jackie. “Enchanting Art,” Journal North, October 21 2015 Sultan, Altoon. “John Zurier: Poetic Reticence,” Studio and Garden, February 24 Ray, Eleanor. “John Zurier,” The Brooklyn Rail, March 5 “John Zurier,” The New Yorker, March 9 Robinson, Emil. “A Vessel Filling Slowly,” ÆQAI, March 24 Bergman, Jeff. “Painting Lives! Zurier, Frecon and Nozkowski,” Atlas: Art News & Reviews & Interviews, April 9 Ebony, David. “John Zurier,” Art in America, May 12 Rhodes, David. “’Correspondances’: Evocations of Real World Experience in the Paintings of John Zurier,” artcritical.com, March 12 “Here are the Nominees for the 2014 AICA Awards,” ArtNews, February 27 2014 Bennett, Steve. “Lights, colors of Iceland inform artist’s work,” San Antonio Express News, April 13 Castro, Laslie Moody. “John Zurier at Lawrence Markey,” ArtForum, April 21 Mangini, Elizabeth. “John Zurier: MATRIX 255,” Caa.reviews, June 4 Tedford, Matthew Harrison. “John Zurier on Iceland, Light, and Landscape,” KQED Arts, October 6 Baker, Kenneth. “Art reviews: John Zurier in Berkeley,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 21 Baker, Kenneth. “Art review: John Zurier in Berkeley, Jurgen Trautwein in S.F.,” SF Gate, October 31
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Howard, Rachel. “Painter John Zurier stirs memories with color, light,” SFGate, December 10 Golden, Alisa. “For the Love of Painting, Texture, Light, and Place: John Zurier,” Making Handmade Books, December 23 2013 Seed, John, “Once I get there, I Know Where I am,” The Huffington Post, July 26 Schjeldahl, Peter, “Goings on About Town: Art, John Zurier,” The New Yorker, June 24 Maine, Stephen, “One Foot In The Sublime: John Zurier at Peter Blum,” ArtCritical, May 26 “John Zurier at Peter Blum,” NY Arts, May 1 Ebony, David, “The Lookout: A Weekly Guide to Shows You Won’t Want to Miss,” May 9 Baker, Kenneth, “John Zurier: Watercolors,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 20 Johnson, Ken, “Going Solo Has Its Day, in a Hodgepodge of Styles, Art Dealers Association Show at Park Avenue Armory,” New York Times, March 7 Sultan, Altoon. “Atmosphere and Touch: The Paintings of John Zurier,” Studio and Garden, May 19 2012 Fer, Briony, “The 30th Sao Paulo Bienal,” Artforum, December “Top 10 from the Sao Paulo Bienal,” Art in America, September 25 (online) 2011 Baker, Kenneth, “John Zurier, Paintings and Watercolors,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 22 Knight, Christopher, “California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art,” Los Angeles Times, Jan 6 2010 Harvey, Doug,“Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Biennial?” LA Weekly, Nov 18 Wilson, Michael, “Le Tableau,” Time Out New York / Issue 777 : Aug 19–25 Morgan, Robert C., “Le Tableau at Cheim and Read,” Artcritical.com, July 23 Smith, Roberta, “Le Tableau: French Abstraction and Its Affinities,” The New York Times, July 2 2009 Baker, Kenneth, “Abstracts Commingle Well at Meridian,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 28 Feldman, Melissa, “John Zurier, Gallery Paule Anglim,” Frieze, Issue 125, September Fazzolari, Bruno, “John Zurier & John Beech,” Stretcher Reviews, San Francisco, CA 2008 Newhall, Edith. “A Larry Becker Show Hail the Hue,” The Philadelphia Enquirer, July 25 Newhall, Edith. “Night Paintings,” The Philadelphia Enquirer, March 20 2007 Smith, Roberta. “John Zurier: Paintings”, The New York Times, May 18 Baker, Kenneth. “Good, Bad, Ugly at Langton,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 17 2005 Baker, Kenneth. “Zurier at Anglim,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 18 Fyfe, Joe. “John Zurier at Larry Becker,” Art in America, November Jayavant, Prajakti. “John Zurier, New Paintings at Gallery Paule Anglim,” Stretcher.org Newhall, Edith. “Paint in a Bottle,” The Philadelphia Enquirer, April 15 2003 Baker, Kenneth. “Zurier’s Quiet Brush,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 25 Searle, Adrian. “Lost in Space,” The Guardian UK, July 15 2002 Aronowitz, Al. “Column Seventy”, The Blacklisted Journalist, April 1 Baker, Kenneth. “The Possibility of an Image,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 22 Moutot, Michel. “La Biennale du Whitney Museum descend dans Central Park”, Agence France-Presse, March 9 Princenthal, Nancy. “Whither the Whitney Biennial”, Art in America, June Saltz, Jerry. “American Bland Stand,” Village Voice, March 7
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Smith, Roberta.“Bad News for Art at the Whitney Biennial,” The New York Times, March 31 Sozanski, Edward. “Three Painters,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 1 Vicente, Mercedes. “La Biennal de Whitney,” La Vanguardia, March 7 Searle, Adrian. “Lost in Space,” The Guardian UK, July 15 2001 Baker, Kenneth. “Louise Fishman/John Zurier,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 14 Hamlin, Jesse. “John Zurier Captures Joy in Fields of Color,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 4 2000 Baker, Kenneth. “Painting’s Move Toward the Vanishing Point,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 8 Bonetti, David. “John Zurier’s New Work at Gallery Paule Anglim,” San Francisco Examiner, January 12 1999 Baker, Kenneth. “Zurier’s Wavering Lines of Uncertainty,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 20 1998 Bonetti, David. “Abstraction is Back,” San Francisco Examiner, October 22 Bonetti, David. “Ten Takes on Painterly Abstraction,” San Francisco Examiner, August 11 Krantz, Claire Wolf. “Practice and Process,” SEE, September-October Martin, Victoria. “Practice and Process: New Painterly Abstraction at the Armory Center for the Arts,” Artweek, April Wilson, William. “Pasadena Armory Showcases California Abstractionists,” Los Angeles Times, March 30 1996 Bonetti, David. “Return of the Abstract at Mills College,” San Francisco Examiner, December 6 Webster, Mary Hull. “Anne Appleby, Gregg Renfrow and John Zurier at Arts Benicia,” Artweek, April Shaboy, Benny. Interview with John Zurier, studioNOTES, January/March 1994 Baker, Kenneth. “Reviews: John Zurier at Paule Anglim,” ARTnews, October 1993 Baker, Kenneth. “John Zurier at Anglim,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 20 1992 Baker, Kenneth. “Three Painters at Oakland Show,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 24 1990 Baker, Kenneth. “Zurier’s Monotypes at Bank of America,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 20 1989 Baker, Kenneth. “Forthright, Bold Abstracts,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 17 1987 Mochary, Alexandra. “Bay Area Art – Take Another Look,” Antiques and Fine Art, November/December 1986 Brunson, Jamie. “A Sense of Spiritual metaphor,”Artweek, November 29 Shere, Charles. “Strong Statement for Expressive Abstraction,” Oakland Tribune, November 27 Shere, Charles. “Vitality Spills Out from Canvases of Young Bay Artists,” Oakland Tribune, February 4 1985 Ames, Richard. “John Zurier at Pamela Auchincloss Gallery,” Santa Barbara California news Press, October 12 Shere, Charles. “Pro Arts Stages Welcome Revival of Juried Annual,” Oakland Tribune, December 24 Solnit, Rebecca. “A Familiar Future,” Artweek, July 13
BOOKS, MONOGRAPHS, AND CATALOGUES
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
2015 John Zurier Paintings: 1981-2014. New York, NY: Peter Blum Edition, 2015. 2012 São Paulo Bienal – The Imminence of Poetics, (catalog), Luis Pérez-Oramas, Tobi Maier, André Severo, Isabela Villanueva 2011 Repeat After Me_Poems by Bill Berkson, Watercolors by John Zurier. Published by Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA 2010 2010 California Biennial : Orange County Museum of Art, (catalog) Sarah C. Bancroft 2008 To: Night (Contemporary Representations of the Night) (catalog), curated by Joachim Pissarro, Mara Hoberman, Julia Moreno The 7th Gwangju Biennial: 2008 Annual Report (catalog), curated by Okwui Enwezor, et al. John Zurier Night Paintings: 2007-2008 (catalog), Larry Becker Contemporary Art Philadelphia, PA 2005 John Zurier: New Paintings 2005. San Francisco, CA: Gallery Paule Anglim, 2005. (exhibition catalogue) 2003 EXODUS: Between Promise and Fulfillment. Essay by Anthony Downey. Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge: Cambridge, England, 2003. (exhibition catalogue) 2002 Rinder, Lawrence, et. al. Whitney Biennial 2002. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002. (exhibition catalogue) 2000 John Zurier Paintings 1997-1999. Interview with Lawrence Rinder. San Francisco, CA: Gallery Paule Anglim, 2000. (exhibition catalogue) 1998 Practice and Process: New Painterly Abstraction in California. Introduction by Jay Belloli and Jeff Nathanson. Pasadena and Richmond, CA: Armory Center for the Arts and the Richmond Art Center, 1998. (exhibition catalogue) 1996 Abstraction Absolved: Ten Bay Area Painters. Introduction by Keith Lachowicz. Oakland, CA: Mills College Art Gallery, 1996. (exhibition catalogue) 1986 Garner Tullis Workshop: Monotypes. Introduction by Memory Holloway. Praz/Vully, Switzerland. Galerie Au Poisson Rouge, 1986. (exhibition catalogue)
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CRITICS’ PICKS OCTOBER 10, 2019
NEW YORK John Zurier PETER BLUM GALLERY 176 Grand Street 2nd Floor September 27–November 9, 2019
The thirteen paintings in John Zurier’s solo exhibition—obliquely derived from the atmospheric conditions of Berkley, California, and Reykjavík, Iceland—affirm the artist as a deft painter of weather and light. For over two decades, Zurier’s gestural works have made the most of his preferred medium’s essential ingredients: color and surface. His intimately scaled canvases usually express an affinity for a pared-down palette of warm and cool grays. Yet this presentation offers a few lively exceptions.
Three commanding pieces from the series “North from Here” (all works 2019) hang together on the gallery’s eastern wall. Each sports a variegated field of luxurious ultramarine against an airy white ground flanked by perpendicular bands. Despite their tenuous relationship to landscapes (especially given their verticality), one cannot help but read John Zurier, Urður, 2019, oil on linen, 84 × 58". the white patches along each painting’s upper Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York edge as clouds gently drifting past an open window.
The most striking of the large canvases is Urður—its exquisite field of pale blue is almost completely obfuscated by an application of acidic green. Upon close inspection, the viewer can notice how the thin marks skate across the linen—recording every nuanced inflection of the artist’s hand—until halting just before meeting the work’s left and right edges where the slivers of azure have been carefully preserved. One finds oneself repeatedly pulled back into the painting’s shallow space each time one’s eyes wander toward its perimeter. Urður, along with its pink cousin The Wind, connote a sense of ethereal joyousness, distinguishing them from smaller canvases such as Keisetsu no Kou (Firefly and Snow, Success) and Mure (14 years ago), which embody a foreboding tone. Most of the works don’t deviate from Zurier’s signature program; yet the show underscores his ability to distill the essence of visual experience into images that achieve a rare synthesis of thought and feeling.
— Andy Martinelli Clark
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Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Art INCONVERSATION JOHN ZURIER with Erik Lindman
“The thing that I want to grasp is the thing that can’t be grasped. And air can’t be grasped—but we feel it.”
October 2, 2019
I recently had the pleasure of spending a few days at John Zurier’s home and studio outside of Reykjavík, Iceland—a country the California native has lived in off and on for the past 15 years with artist Nina Zurier, his wife. While Zurier’s paintings are often inflected with his experience Portrait of John Zurier, pencil on paper by Phong Bui. of the natural world, they are never depictions of it. These unadorned, confident, and even-keeled canvases resist arguing for, or against, any ideology. Instead, their rigor serves to bring us closer to the world. When speaking with John, it becomes clear that the deep intellect and humility present in his paintings are an authentic outgrowth of the artist’s own generous ON VIEW character. Peter Blum North from Here North from Here, Zurier’s fifth exhibition of paintings at Peter Blum September 27 – Gallery, New York, is on view until November 9. In the following November 9, 2019 interview, compiled from multiple conversations in Iceland, Zurier New York shares the life experiences that have informed his artistic trajectory, from growing up in a house full of Modernist masterpieces, to his academic training in landscape architecture. In the process of clarifying his inspirations, Zurier refreshingly defines in his own language the words frequently ascribed to his paintings.
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Erik Lindman (Rail): The first work of art I remember seeing as a child that I both loved and recognized as art is a painting by Van Gogh at The Met, titled Shoes (1888), the painting of his boots. Do you remember the first painting that you saw that you loved as a child?
John Zurier: I do, but it’s a little different for me in that I grew up with paintings, so they were always in my life and in my home. My parents were art collectors—it was really my father's passion. I was born in Santa Monica but we moved to Los Angeles before I was a year old. My father had been collecting before I was born and he was very interested in early American modernist painters, like Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley, also German Expressionists and second generation Abstract Expressionists—a term I don’t like—such as Alfred Leslie, Norman Bluhm, Michael Goldberg, and Richard Diebenkorn. He was crazy about Franz Kline—he didn’t own any but he really wanted to. The painting that I remember at a very young age that just knocked me out was Kirchner’s Dancing Girl. I think it’s from 1911, but it now known as The Russian Dancer Mela (1911). It was in our living room and it had an overwhelming presence. I love that painting. John Zurier, North from Here 1, 2019. Oil on linen, 78 x 48 inches. Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Rail: Did you make art as a kid then?
Zurier: No, not really. I wasn’t one of those kids who was constantly drawing and working in a sketchbook, or being, you know, a creative type. I did try to copy things, though, that were in the house. For example, my father had this wonderful brush and ink drawing by Robert Motherwell, an abstraction, probably from the late ’40s. I was old enough to polish my own shoes. The polish came in a glass bottle with a round cotton ball on the end of a little stick. The ends of the brush strokes in the Motherwell were rounded. I knew nothing about brushes—rounds or filberts or flats. I didn’t know anything about painting. So I was convinced that because the lines were so black and ended in this round shape, Motherwell must have painted this with shoe polish. So, I got some typing paper and shoe polish and tried to recreate this work, but I couldn’t do it. I could get the round mark to start with, but I couldn’t replicate the curvy gesture of the line—even though I made a whole bunch of them.
Rail: Did your father see those?
Zurier No, I never showed stuff to anybody. Never. But, I liked to make things, mostly in wood and plaster. I liked the physicality of stuff, and in retrospect I think I was interested in abstract forms. I also liked the idea of making paint.
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Rail: Even at that time?
Zurier: Yeah, and I wasn’t doing anything with the paint but I was making it. There’s this bush called—it’s one of the few Latin names I remember from landscape architecture—it’s Syzygium paniculatum, an Australian bush cherry. They have these little red berries, and as kids we’d eat them because they were a little tart, and you could also throw them at walls and they’d make a red mark. I figured if I crushed them I could make ink. Then I realized if you crushed things you could make paint if you added water, so I would take chips of brick and stone and would go out in the backyard and grind them together, adding a little water to them. I didn’t do anything with it, but I really felt like, wow, this is how you make paint.
Rail: Going back to Kirchner’s Russian dancer painting, do you remember what it was that you felt connected to in that artwork specifically?
Zurier: The color and the roughness and the excitement of it. She has a mask-like face, and very pointy feet, like a ballerina on pointe. I was really struck by this intense angle of her feet coming to a point. You know, I’m a kid, I don’t know anything about dancing but I wanted to dance with her. She was about my size, maybe a little bigger than me—I was 4, maybe 5—I think I was in love with her. And it has my favorite color tonalities—Prussian blue, John Zurier, Niður, 2019. Oil on linen, 78 x 52 inches. Viridian and Chromium oxide green, white, and a Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York. pink made from Venetian red—these are colors I use a lot now. And it’s got this rough stroke to it. I loved it.
Rail: And what do you think art represented to your father?
Zurier: I think it saved his life.
Rail: How so?
Zurier: It was the one place that he found complete solace and a way of nonverbally communing with something so much bigger than himself. It gave him an enormous amount of peace. I think Matisse got a lot of flack for the statement about art being a comfortable armchair for an intellectual worker or businessman at the end of the day, but that’s what it was like. I would come home and I would sit in the room that had paintings that I liked a lot in it, and then my dad would come home and we would just sit together in silence looking at the paintings, and it was actually one of the
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I remember him specifically doing that with Arthur Dove’s painting Moon (1935). The painting is now in the National Gallery in Washington and that was a painting that, when I look back on it now, is one of the works that meant the most to me. Also a Kokoschka watercolor that was of a standing figure, hard to tell if it was a man or woman, holding something in their hands and completely enigmatic. It had this broad stroke I always thought of as a moment of fragility and watery color, and I just loved it. I have to say I didn’t understand any of this, I just looked at them—but paintings by Diebenkorn from ’53— ’54 from the Urbana and Berkeley series, those really struck me. Also a very small Tàpies painting that was made with canvas and sand— it looked like he had poked his fingers into the sand and I could see the weave of the canvas underneath.
Rail: When friends came over to your house what did they think of the art?
Zurier: I don’t ever remember talking to anybody about it. I remember—to go back to making art as a kid, the first painting I ever made, I wanted to paint the sea. I wanted to make the rolling waves. I went to the art store John Zurier, Urður, 2019. Oil on linen, 84 x 58 inches. and I bought a large pad of watercolor paper Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York and I thought, “I only need to buy one color of paint and white.” And I wanted it to be green so I bought Phthalo green. So I had Phthalo green and white and a white piece of paper, and I tried to paint the rolling waves and I just couldn’t do it. I worked so hard on this thing and then I put it in a drawer and I never showed it to anybody. The interesting thing is that I still have that painting and in a way it’s close to what I’m doing now.
Rail: In high school were you taking art classes at all?
Zurier: No, not really. I thought it would be great to take painting and drawing, but the painting teacher, I just couldn’t deal with his style, he would play guitar while you’re making reproductions of album covers. I tried a drawing class and they had an egg on a pedestal with the spotlights and the chalk drawing on the blackboard showing core shadows and highlights and I thought “I can’t cope with this either.” So I took ceramics and sculpture, with a teacher named John Riddle, and he was the first real artist I met.
Rail: What did that mean to you in high school?
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Zurier: Riddle was committed to making art. He just exuded this sense of authority, intention, integrity—and he was the most influential (and the only) art teacher I had in high school. So it was really great, but I couldn’t center, and that was what all the cool kids did—
Rail: You mean in ceramics, not emotionally—
Zurier: Yes, exactly. [Laughter.] Yes, in this case ceramics. Throwing on the wheel, that was what the goal seemed to be, and I found it really difficult to center clay on a wheel. I don’t know why. So I just would make coiled forms, and then I would do splash-type glazes and things like that. But then I realized I didn’t want to stay with that, so I took shop classes and I’d make carved wood objects and figures, things like a kangaroo with a baby in its pouch. I also liked metalworking—especially hammered copper. I loved the idea of craft, and of being a craftsperson. From there I decided to take architecture classes but mostly they were mechanical drawing, and I really liked that: the straight edge, how to turn a line—it was fantastic. I did a lot of mechanical drawings, which in a way was geometric drawing, and also architectural models. I think this interest in ceramics, handcrafted things, and geometry was building a foundation for a lot that I’m interested in now.
Rail: Was art school out of the question?
Zurier: I wanted to go to RISD to study architecture, but my parents thought I should go to Brown to get a liberal arts education first, and then study architecture. Then what happened was paying for out of state tuition was out of the question, so I had to go to school in California and I applied to Berkeley and was accepted.
Rail: At Berkeley, what were the architecture classes like?
Zurier: Well, I never actually took architecture classes, because I couldn’t get in to the architecture school, but I did get into the College of Natural Resources. In elementary and high school I was active in anti-Vietnam war protests, and was also involved in the ecology movement. This was the late ’60s and early ’70s. Natural Resources was a brand new college at the University, and they needed enrollment there. It was interdisciplinary, combining science and sociology. I was taking Earth Sciences, Physical Geography, and Environmental courses. During the first year my interest shifted from architecture to environmental design—from building to place and space. I had always been interested in Japanese gardens, and what happened was one summer I was working with a group of people who were studying landscape architecture. I thought this takes the architecture, it takes the interest in ecology, the interest in gardens, interest in drawing, and puts it all together. So, I transferred into the Landscape Architecture department, and I have a degree in Landscape Architecture.
In order to get into the Landscape Architecture department, I thought I needed to take drawing and sculpture classes: so as a freshman I took drawing with Joan Brown. She was my first drawing teacher, and she was phenomenal.
Rail: What was her teaching style like?
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Zurier: Very direct, very clear. Essentially, you had a 6B pencil, no eraser, a pad of newsprint, and you made contour drawings from the still life. The most important thing was she wouldn’t let you erase. Her attitude was: you have to make a line with conviction, even if it’s wrong.
Rail: And sculpture?
Zurier: Beginning Sculpture was one of my favorite classes, taught by Sidney Gordon. For one assignment we had to make a caricature, and he had this sort of Mister Magoo face, and it was just so easy, he was almost a cartoon to start with, like, it wasn’t a caricature, it was realism! So, I made a portrait of him, and as soon as I did, I thought, “Oh my god, he’s just gonna think I’m either ridiculing him or I’m trying to suck up to him.” But, he actually liked it a lot. After class he came up to me and he said, “I like your portrait and I would like to buy it.” I said, “You can have it,” and he said, “No, I would like to buy it and I will give you $10 for it.” I said okay. When he handed me the money, he held onto it and said, “If you accept this $10, it means you are now a professional artist.” I took more classes with him and made abstract welded steel sculptures. We became friends after I graduated, and he was a close friend of Elmer Bischoff.
Rail: Is that how you met Bischoff?
Zurier: No, I met Bischoff through Joan Brown. Bischoff was also teaching at Berkeley. I worked with him at the end of my undergrad studies and decided to apply to the MFA program to continue working with him. My first painting class was an advanced painting class with Joan Brown.
Rail: No beginner’s class?
Zurier: Never had a beginning painting class—she just let me in. As soon as I started painting I knew this was what I wanted to do. Elmer was Joan’s teacher at SFAI and she was always talking about things he had said when she was a student. After taking three classes with Joan, I thought, “He's down the hall, I could actually just go hear it straight from him.” With Elmer, I immediately felt like I had found someone I understood—or at least wanted to understand. He had a wonderfully descriptive way of talking. He really helped me to see painting. I learned a lot from him in terms of constructing with color, and building up a painting through touch. He told me once, “Diebenkorn's so lean. He can float a color across the whole surface, but I have to touch it all the way across from one passage to the next.” And it wasn’t a comparison thing, he was just appreciating Diebenkorn’s leanness. And you can really see this in Bischoff’s later abstractions—I wish they were better known.
Rail: That makes me think of the story of when Robert Ryman started painting, he needed to cover his whole hand with paint, and waste it, in order to feel like he could get started. I don't know if “waste” is the correct word, but he needed to try not to make a painting at first and feel that texture. I was wondering: What were the first paintings that you made, and how did Joan Brown open up painting to you?
Zurier: Well, I've never heard that story, but I love it because it makes sense. It's like, here’s this material and what is it? That almost sounds like the way I was out in the backyard crushing bricks to make paint. I didn't know how to grind pigment, I was just touching it and rubbing it on my hand. School was formal and Joan taught from a model and you had to work large—at least five by seven
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Here’s Joan Brown’s teaching in a nutshell: “Follow your nose.” One time I was painting the interior of a room and I was trying to paint the molding at the top and get the perspective right—and I’m painting it freehand, a seven-foot long horizontal line. She comes over to me and she says, "What are you doing? Get a ruler!” She was very direct, encouraging, and tough. The highest praise from Joan was that something was spiritual. Which meant that it was connecting to something. Spirit. Elmer's highest praise was “this is poetry.”
Rail: At this time you were making paintings that weren't yet your own. When did you start making paintings that felt like they were?
Zurier: Probably around 1994 or 1995, which is 10 years after I finished grad school. But you know, this is all in hindsight, because all the time I was working, I felt like I was making my own paintings. In 1984, when I finished grad school, I knew what was happening in contemporary painting, but I didn't want to give up an improvisational kind of painting. This was the time of Transavanguardia and analytical strategies in painting—Peter Halley, Neo-Geo—this was all happening at a time when I was making gestural abstract painting that referenced landscape. So I thought, why not be direct and actually paint a landscape. So for about six months I did plein air landscape paintings. What I discovered was that landscape was not my subject, my subject was color and movement, painting itself, and formal abstraction. I had been making abstract paintings before, but I had been using the compositional John Zurier, Hill, 2019. Oil on linen, 15 3/4 x 21 3/4 language of representational painting. I needed to inches. Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York. make them more abstract, more two-dimensional. I needed to start over. I've always been interested in the material of painting, and going back to childhood, what I was looking at in my parents’ home was how the paintings were made.
Rail: Like the Dove painting, Moon?
Zurier: Moon is a perfect example because that painting has a dry surface. It has thin washes of oil paint. It's actually painted like a watercolor, where the ground is providing a lot of the light. Then there are also areas of heavier paint. And then the Diebenkorn paintings—I was interested in how they seemed so spontaneous, and how hard it is to do that. But in two of the Diebenkorns, what I was really looking at were the supports—one was painted on a medium weight cotton duck, and the other was on a very fine muslin. The paint on the cotton duck was thick impasto, but the other was very thinly painted so that, like in Moon, the ground generates light.
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Rail: In the Hartley painting you grew up with, The Warriors (1913), the white in the painting is the ground coming through.
Zurier: Yes, it's also thinly painted. As a kid I thought it must be unfinished. “Okay, if this painting is finished, why is this not painted?” As a child, there’s no conceptual or art-historical framework for this, I'm just looking, and what I see is that when you look at the center of the painting, you can see the underpainting of the drawing, and then as you get up to the top, there are more unpainted areas. So, the ground color creates a light as if the forms are disappearing. The energy of the painting is perfectly complete, so he doesn't have to fill everything up because it's sparking. When I first saw a Cézanne painting up close, I understood how the color is moving over the empty unpainted spots. It’s something that I still look at a lot, this aerated surface, the use of unpainted areas, “unfinished” areas. And I have spent a lot of time learning to make the proper grounds for my paintings. And what I’ve been talking about with the paintings I loved early on, is the question of how to make a painting that’s halfway between a sketch and a finished painting.
Rail: These days, learning to making your own grounds is very adventurous as a painter.
John Zurier, Hundasúra, 2019. Oil on linen, 18 x 22 inches. Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York.
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Zurier: To me it's just so basic. I knew that I wanted to work with traditional, conventional material: a stretcher, fabric, and paint. So, then how do you get these together and then what does this mean? I started with acrylic grounds because that's what I was using on wood panels and then I realized how much the ground was affecting what I was doing. I started making line paintings on a ground in which I would mix iridescent pigment with chalk, so they had this reflective surface. Then I would draw a line down it freehand, vertical. If that felt okay, I would draw another one, if that didn't feel right I would erase it, then I would add another. The tone or the surface color of the painting was developed through erasure, and then I would continue. What making these paintings actually did was broaden my vision. Because I was standing back from the painting, using a brush stuck in the end of a six, or even eight foot, bamboo pole, I was able to see the whole surface, not just focusing on the point where the brush was. It was complete focus—in vision, mind, and body.
Rail: Is that when your work began to engage more with what we think about in terms of “monochrome”?
Zurier: Yes, actually it is. I would put this ground down and then I would put the canvas up on the wall to start painting on it, and then I would think, “I can’t paint on it. This is really too interesting the way it is.” But I couldn’t accept it as a painting. That took awhile. By this time I was not just using white grounds, I was mixing pigment into them, so my first monochromes came from the grounds I made for the line paintings, or as a result of the painting out of the lines. Most were from painting over things. It wasn’t about making a painting with a single color. Once I painted my way into monochrome I thought I needed to make a decision about figure ground relationships, until I realized I didn’t have to. It is not an either/or position for me.
Rail: It seems very much like the work you’re continuing to explore today.
Zurier: Yes, it is. I can have lines, shapes, fields of color, make one as different from the other as possible, work in groups, variations—it’s wide open. I’m thinking about the surface and light, and the way that light seems to be attached, or floating, or hovering off the surface and the way the color—a very specific color—is activated in each painting. The color of the painting is the content, not an attribute. And the color is related to things I have experienced in the world. The paintings also have associations: to weather, natural phenomena, landscape, places, and things. I can use a direct source or not. I can actually do that now because rather than try to deny the world, I have realized that I’m not separate from the world. It’s actually okay to have those associations. The kind of naturalness I’m after is like water running downhill—it is what it is. But if you try to talk about it, it’s no longer natural, but conceptualized, and I wanted to get away from that.
Rail: A number of the words you described your teachers using to talk about art are often still used to describe certain aspects of your painting today. Would you continue to describe "poetic" in the same way as Bischoff?
Zurier: Yes, I would—I mean poetic. In painting the word “poetic” is often used to mean lyrical”— or something vague, soft, misty, and emotional. But I think poetry is hard and clear—condensed sensation. It opens up something unexpectedly. So that’s the definition of poetic I ascribe to.
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Rail: And how about “tone”?
Zurier: Well, tone is like the definition of the word “atmosphere”—the tone of this room is comfortable, the tone of this room is energetic. I think of tone as air. When I’m painting, I’m looking for a mood which is connected to air, which is connected to light, which is all connected to a color and to the brushwork that delivers it, and then all of that is attached and enmeshed in a surface.
Rail: And air is something that we feel but don't see?
Zurier: Yeah. Like the wind. We see the effects not the cause. I think about air and wind constantly.
Rail: But you said you can see air, can you talk a little bit about that?
Zurier: The thing that I want to grasp is the thing that can’t be grasped. And air can’t be grasped—but we feel it. You and I have just been up in the north of Iceland, in Skagafjörður, which has this stunning light. There's a story about a 19th century Danish landscape painter who came to Skagafjörður for the summer, to a John Zurier, Esjuberg 2, 2019. Glue-size tempera on town called Sauðárkrókur, to paint because it's known linen, 23 5/8 x 15 3/4 inches. Courtesy Peter Blum for its beautiful light. And so, he got there, set up his Gallery, New York. easel, he would try to paint, but he left after a week because he couldn't capture the light. So, it's a romantic story about trying to catch the thing we see, feel we can almost grasp, but can't quite reach. When we were driving up there, we saw the light caught in the air between us and the mountain across the valley. It’s easier to see air when there’s something in it, you know, like dust, or the drizzle making that light we saw so spectral, or the mist and fog, or the air colored by the reflected light off buildings in the Bay Area. But then sometimes the air is just so clear it’s startling. I can see that. To make these sensations tangible—that’s the thing.
Rail: You haven't picked up your bags and left.
Zurier: I still have a lot of work to do.
Contributor Erik Lindman is an artist based in New York. This year he will be recognized at the Hirshhorn Museum gala, an honor he shares with John Zurier.
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Light & Memory: An Interview with John Zurier
By Jennifer Sauer - Thursday, May 3, 2018 John Zurier’s abstract, nearly monochrome paintings are spare in form and substantial in presence. The true beauty of the works lies in their subtlety. Zurier’s pieces quietly demand that one looks and looks again to see all that is there - past the uniform tones of backdrop, the creases of canvas, the intention of marks and gestures, then pans back to the whole of what is there - to really see it. There is more, something intangible about the blend of color, surface, density and light, a word that comes up often in my conversation with Zurier. His particular brand of alchemy is so exacting that the process is often years in the making, storing a piece then bringing it back into view many times over to get it perfectly right. In the viewer’s experience of a painting, he emphasizes the role of intuitive recall and subjective experience. “Paintings are not about memory. They touch something within our memory,” said Zurier. He continues that his approach is different with every painting. Each has a different application of brush and color to create a distinctive overall effect for that work. Essence is as much the quest as openness in his artistic ends, the revisions and evocation of which are interconnected. “My working process demands the ability to work in uncertainty. I don’t have a plan,” said Zurier. What he definitively does have is vision. He acknowledges that there is a fragility to it, an attribute that can be over or under imposed on the canvas and subsequently, undone. For Zurier, there is always a balancing act to maintain the integrity between what exists in his mind’s eye and on the canvas in front of him. ArtDependence Magazine: How has the backdrop of living in two very different environments, Berkeley, California and Reykjavik, Iceland, influenced your work? John Zurier: I have always been very interested in light and watching the weather and how it changes. In the Bay Area, the light is yellow and clear and Mediterranean. In Iceland, it is blue and crystalline and Nordic. Since my work is so much about color, the color of the light obviously has a big effect on me. I’m interested in different qualities of light, and spending time in these two very different places is good for me. There is a great song, “Don’t Forget the Northern Morning Light” by Benni Hemm Hemm, an Icelandic musician, and it captures the feeling I have about the light in Iceland.
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JOHN ZURIER, Oblaka 2, 2000. Oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches (61.0 x 45.7 cm)
JOHN ZURIER, Looking Out To Sea, 2009. Distemper and oil on linen, 72 x 44 inches (182.8 x 111.8 cm)
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JOHN ZURIER, Svartur Klettur 1, 2012. Glue tempera on cotton, 108 x 75 inches (274.32 x 190.5 cm)
AD: While your paintings move towards reduction and monochrome, unexpected marks and gestures appear on the canvases. What is the envisioned effect, contrast or complementarity? JZ: The marks and dabs are sometimes random, sometimes deliberate. Sometimes they might recall a fold or dent in the canvas that I saw when I first stretched it. They may harmonize, modulate or disrupt the surface and also bring your attention to it. AD: How do you feel the audience’s experience of time and memory is affected by a work’s surface and color? JZ: That’s a really hard question. You see the color and surface, and maybe then that triggers a memory or emotion that will take you to another time. I don’t think it is about nostalgia. The Swedish writer, Harry Martinsson, says we have as much control over our memories as we do our dreams. AD: How do the structure and mechanics of painting impact the artistic product of your work? JZ: It is all about the materials for me. I use different types of canvas and linen, different grounds, I use oil paint and glue–size tempera which is also called distemper. Each painting is the result of what materials I choose to work with, as well as the size, the format, the depth of the stretcher, and so forth. I like open, dry surfaces that show the beauty of the pigment.
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JOHN ZURIER, Far (For Hreinn Friðfinnsson), 2016. Glue-size tempera on linen. 15 3/4 x 19 5/8 inches (40 x 50 cm)
JOHN ZURIER, Mountain (Far), 2016-2017. Glue-size tempera on linen. 29 x 37 inches (73.7 x 94 cm)
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JOHN ZURIER, Brim, 2017. Oil on linen, 90 x 60 inches (228.6 x 152.4 cm)
AD: You have said: “I think the Japanese painter Ike No Taiga was right, the most difficult thing to achieve in painting is creating a space where absolutely nothing has been painted.” Describe the inherent difficulty in achieving this end. JZ: Ike No Taiga was talking about activating an empty space, about giving a sense of presence within absence. It is about activating the Void. That’s really hard to do. AD: At Frieze 2018, Peter Blum Gallery is showing a survey of your work from 2000-2017. What defines this era of your career as an artist? JZ: The survey begins with work from 2000, but in fact, this era began in for me in 1995. I had been using a kind of representational language to make abstract paintings, but then I realized that I didn’t want to deal with deep space or illusions of space, just color and surface. AD: You have said: “I am interested in the gap between abstraction and evocation, between what is determinate and indeterminate, direct and suggested.” What ideas exist in this space and how does it inform the content of your art? JZ: It is about the ambiguity. Fairfield Porter said something to the effect that a metaphor is small but an ambiguity has no limits. It is about freedom, to be able to hold two or more opposing things together.
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INTERVIEWS Apr 5, 2018
Ambiguity as Strength: A Conversation with John Zurier
by Jason Stopa
John Zurier: Taktur, 2017, oil on linen, 35 by 46 inches. Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York
John Zurier is a painter who lives and works in Berkeley and Iceland. His work has been exhibited widely in solo exhibitions, most recently at Peter Blum Gallery in New York and Anglim Gilbert Gallery in San Francisco. This fall his work will be shown at Berg Contemporary in Reykjavík and Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin. Working in a reductive, monochromatic format, Zurier makes paintings in varying sizes that defy easy categorization. They aren’t provisional paintings. There is also no irony in them. Zurier’s paintings treat paint as both atmospheric light and as physical material on a surface. In “Slow Painting,” an essay recently published in A.i.A., Stephen Westfall describes the liminal quality of Zurier’s compositions: “Here and there a rectangle, a wedge shape, or a line may hold a composition, but these elements are the most refined of architectural members, meant to hold the veil or trembling membrane of color that is each painting’s keynote.” In his
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY paintings, ambiguity is strength. In this interview, Zurier discusses silence in painting, the atmosphere of the San Marco convent in Florence, and chance operations, among other things that shape his practice.
JASON STOPA Your paintings have always possessed a sensitivity to temperature and touch. In your 2017 show at Peter Blum Gallery in New York, the color in your paintings was richer and beefier than it had been in previous shows. This density translated into a more complex atmosphere, where mark-making appeared more declarative and less recessive. What inspired the change?
JOHN ZURIER I’m happy you see it that way. I think it was a process of distillation. I can’t say what inspired it exactly. I was aware of wanting my paintings to be tougher and more resolute– especially since I am dealing with evanescence, with dematerialized densities of paint, color and light. All the paintings in that show were completed in a new studio. For thirty years I painted in studios with large skylights, where the light was really intense and coming from above and bouncing all over. In my new studio I have a long wall of floor-to-ceiling, north-facing windows. The light is still bright, but more diffuse, colder, and it comes from the side instead of the top. I can see the surface of the paintings better in the raking light. It’s just different.
John Zurier: Late Afternoon in Three Parts (Innsigling), 2017, glue-size tempera on linen, 84 by 58 inches. Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York
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STOPA Frederic Matys Thursz was a Moroccan-American painter of monochromes who scraped, glazed, and reworked his paintings to achieve a density of color. He once wrote “painting is invention, not reference or anecdote, neither depiction or alliteration.” His influence on monochromatic painting cannot be denied. At times your paintings capture a sense of a specific atmosphere, perhaps even a time of day. Do you make works that lend themselves a metaphorical or even poetic reading, or do you adhere to an austere approach like Thursz’s?
ZURIER I am fine with a metaphorical reading. But why not look for as open a reading as possible, or better, multiple readings? The paintings are wide open, physically and metaphorically exposed. My focus is on painting, and how the color, surface and brushwork all come together to make a certain light, not so much about making references. But they are there. I don’t deny them or try to remove them when I see them. I am looking for a light that is in the back of my mind. It’s something I have seen that defies articulation. It’s precise and it’s fragile, and I never know when it will appear. I am interested in the gap between abstraction and evocation, between what is determinate and indeterminate, direct and suggested. I hope the paintings can be seen as both austere and poetic. The color for me is very specific. When I use malachite and lapis pigments mixed in glue-size and scraped into a coarse linen canvas, I can’t help but see them as inert substances but also simultaneously as the dusk of Iceland and the atmosphere in the cloister of San Marco in Florence.
Thursz’s paintings are terrific. Our work is chalk and cheese, and I am not so sure his attitude was as extreme as you say. I am very sympathetic to his feeling for Symbolist poetry and French postwar painting, especially the work of Jean Fautrier.
STOPA Fautrier is a personal favorite; he makes a painting like making a cake. There is a delicacy to the way he creates a surface, an incredibly light touch countered by a thick impasto and imbued references to the Holocaust. They are both sensual and ominous all at once. They are evocative paintings. There appears to be a growing group of painters that share common ground with what was once referred to as Radical Painting, which includes Marcia Hafif, Joseph Marioni, and Olivier Mosset. Their work, which is reductive and sparse, represents a few branches on the tree of monochromatic painting after Ryman. Their work inspired another generation concerned with similar aims but to a different effect, a generation that grew out of the postmodern ’80s: Michael Brennan, Daniel Levine, perhaps even the playful, tongue-in-cheeky monochromes of Jim Lee. Do you feel this kind of work is having a bit of a resurgence? Do you see yourself as part of a loosely knit group?
ZURIER I can’t answer your question about a revival of monochrome painting because I don’t think along those lines. The painters you named are good artists, but I don’t see myself belonging to a group. My friendships are pretty broad aesthetically, and we need friends to tell us what we’ve done and what we’re doing. Icelandic Conceptual artist Sigurdur Gudmundsson once said to me, “Artists don’t have colleagues. They have friends.”
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John Zurier: Blær, 2011-17. Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York
STOPA In an essay for the February issue of A.i.A., Stephen Westfall writes: “Slow Painting is not anti-gestural, but Slow Painters for the most part avoid flourishes, emulating a relatively anonymous sense of touch.” I see your paintings as being about both a touch that anyone could have and a touch that only you possess. The balance seems to ebb and flow in your paintings. How do you approach intention versus chance? Do you see your approach to painting as antithetical to the ego driven work of painters today? Is it reactionary?
ZURIER Ebb and flow is a nice way of describing it. I would say that, intentional or unintentional, the touch is still mine, in the way that Marcel Duchamp explained it when he told Calvin Tomkins that his chance is his and someone else’s chance is their own. Chance helps to bypass the rational mind but not to escape the self. In terms of brushwork, Matisse and Munch are my primary models. My touch and its removal are in the service of bringing light to the surface. No, my approach is not reactionary. I make the paintings I do because it is what I want to see and the experience I want to have. When I am painting, I follow the brush and my inclinations. Sometimes I feel my paintings counter the world’s cacophony, but that is more of an afterthought. Still, I would be OK with a response like that. In my studio, I have a photograph of Fra Angelico’s lunette fresco of St. Peter Martyr in San Marco’s courtyard, with his finger to his lips asking for silence. It reminds me that silence is both a spiritual principle and the condition of painting.
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STOPA I don’t see your works as reactionary, but I do see them as unbothered by the many trends that painting cycles through in any given decade. I sense a desire to continue to explore a painting on an elemental level. They’re not as idyllic as some minimalist painters; they have a sober manner that has more to do with the world of appearances. You mention specific places where light has left an impact on your work–Iceland or Florence–and the influence of a fourteenth-century painter like Fra Angelico. Are these paintings in some way about essences, or notions of belief?
ZURIER In some respects, yes. I condense things and usually try to leave only what is necessary, but I am not a formalist. As others have said, attempts at reducing painting down to one essential thing—be it flatness, illusion or anti-illusion, or color—tend to fall flat in front of the paintings themselves. Looking for in-between states, suspension, a hovering in the air, variable qualities of light, I feel my paintings are more about ambiguity and openness than essences.
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PETER BLUM G A L L ER Y
VOL. XXVII, NO. 294, PAGE 60, OCTOBER 2017
PRIVATE VIEW
Noteworthy exhibitions at commercial galleries, from emerging names to rediscovered talents
By Pac Pobric
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NYC Gallery Scene – Highlights Through October 1, 2017
Peter Blum Gallery: “John Zurier: Stars Without Distance” September 27 through November 11, 2017 Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 27 from 6 to 8 p.m.
In the first show at Peter Blum’s new downtown location, John Zurier will present new paintings in “Stars Without Distance.”
Inspired by time spent in Iceland, John Zurier’s paintings on linen meld abstraction with a visceral sense of being in the world. The dots, dashes and stray lines on the folds of linen simultaneously reinforce the materiality of the medium while implying an undefined ephemeral space. The paintings, which are both concrete and suggestive, show previous marks by the artist, whether scraped away or revealed, the marks are embedded in the weave, heightening “awareness of memory, place, time and sensation,” according to the gallery.
Peter Blum Gallery is located at 176 Grand St, New York, NY 10013. www.peterblumgallery.com.
"For Nathaniel" by John Zurier, 2017, oil on linen, 78 x 48 inches. Courtesy the Artist and Peter Blum Gallery New York.
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Wednesday, September 27–Saturday, November 11
John Zurier, Leuven (2017). Courtesy of Peter Blum
2. “John Zurier: Stars Without Distance” at Peter Blum
Peter Blum Gallery inaugurates its new, downtown Manhattan space on Grand Street—its old building on 57th Street was slated for demolition—with a selection of abstract paintings by John Zurier. A sense of light and airiness permeates his work, seemingly influenced by his time spent in the wilds of Iceland over the last decade. Location: Peter Blum, 176 Grand Street Price: Free Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Friday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
— Sarah Cascone
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“Correspondances”: Evocations of Real World Experience in the Paintings of John Zurier
David Rhodes, writer March 12, 2015
John Zurier, Afternoon (S.H.G.), 2014. Distemper on linen, 28 x 35 inches. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York.
The title of this exhibition, West of the Future, makes me think of a passage from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden: “I always found myself in dread of west and a love of east. Where I ever got such an idea I could not say unless it could be that the morning came over the peaks of the Galbilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucias.” This passing of light and time together seems wholly apposite in thinking about Zurier’s paintings, which so successfully evoke a feeling of proximity to other sentient beings through the elusive and transitive world of the senses. Each of the paintings here, varying in size and in a color range from greens, pale blues and varied grays, to
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Afternoon (S.H.G.), from 2014, is a 28-by-35-inch horizontally oriented painting, made with distemper on linen, a medium consisting of pigment suspended in a glue, for example a rabbit skin glue. The extent of the actual painted surface — another rectangle a half inch or so shy of three edges — reaches around the left vertical edge, again, by a distance of about a half inch. This off setting of the white painted rectangle simply and subtly asserts the objectness of the support, declaring its role to be coexistent in the production of pictorial space rather than incidental or de facto. This not only avers the status of what we see as a constructed and painted object — distemper painted on linen fabric, over a frame of some sort — it also, whilst objectifying the picture plane, proclaims its capacity for spatial illusion. By incorporating a side edge, only seen of course from a viewing position that is not directly in front, a reading is required that involves movement and the realization that to truly see the painting it has to be seen not as an image of some sort alone, but as a surface bearing paint that has actual depth as well as a porous visual depth. The slight perspectival slope of the left top side edge is echoed by a blue diagonal in the top left corner of the composition, itself joined to a partially erased vertical blue line, that is in turn parallel to, two thirds over at the right side of the painting another blue line. Neither vertical line reaches the exposed raw linen band of the bottom edge, though at the top right hand edge, where the rectangle of white breaks and opens in slightly less opaque brush worked paint, the blue vertical reaches the actual edge of the painting. This area of lessened opacity reaches down through the painting from top right to bottom left — together with the vertical lines a slope of tonal variations recall a hill side fronted by leaf bare trees. Michel Foucault in his Manet and the object of Painting (2009), describes the kind of fixed viewing of a simply depicted space in Western painting, that Eduard Manet turned away from, a tradition Zurier continues: “It must also deny that the picture was a piece of space in front of which the viewer could be displaced, around which the viewer could turn, so that consequently he can grasp an angle or eventually grasp the two sides, and that is why Before and After Summer, 2014. Distemper on painting, since the Quattrocento, has fixed a certain linen, 78 x 48 inches. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, ideal place from which and only from which, one can New York. and must, see the picture.”
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A feint white diagonal line adds further complexity to Afternoon (S.H.G.), adding the illusion of a tilted plane receding from the vertical blue lines, which can, if concentrating on this diagonal slant, stand in as a human orientation against the plane’s horizontality. The raw linen half inch bands at the painting’s edge “frame” the “view,” an evocation rather than a description, akin to Charles Baudelaire’s concept of correspondances — an evocation of real world experiences through the invented world of a painting — an alternative to the analytic mind. Existential tensions between life and art are evinced by memory’s capacity to move between what is present and what is absent. As the white distemper is thin it is consequently often absorbed and as it is worked in short roaming strokes it registers each particular woven, creased or knotted idiosyncrasy of the linen itself. This particular movement of paint, and physically proximate material can recall — with no rational relation — the vapors dispersed from New York’s rooftop pipes seen moving sometimes against low, grayish cloud. The linen surface, whilst tactilely there, moves in and out of focus, against the brushstroked whites, hinting at temporality: A paradoxical and perpetual temporality in the paintings, as opposed to a momentary and actual one. The paintings in West of the Future are invested with Zurier’s interest in Iceland — a place he spends time each year — with its landscape and light, but relate also to other lights and places for this viewer.
Pierre Bonnard presented not only a composite facture of multiple brushstrokes, but the psychological displacement caused by passing moments of time, returned as constant passages of time in paint. Zurier’s, Before and After Summer (2014), a vertical 78-by-48-inch painting in oil on linen, is taller than head height and offers therefore two distances to view from Four Times, 2015. Distemper on linen, 21 ¾ x 29 ¾ inches. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, when close, the variegated passage of brush New York. strokes and abrasions from short distance together with the sense of looking toward or past something when looking up. Dark greens overlay a pale blue, the blue more revealed in two patches adjacent to the painting’s upper limit. Optically the painting’s light level suggests dusk, of northern, rather than southern light constancy. Two artists that have been important to Zurier are recalled here, Bonnard himself, and Munch, though at some distance. More recent artists who come to mind, such as Raoul De Keyser or Günter Förg, occupy the borderland between reference and process. Zurier has combined thoroughly any influences on his process to come up with a singular expression for his own thoughts and experiences.
To view the original article online go to: http://www.artcritical.com/2015/03/12/david-rhodes-on-john-zurier/
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John Zurier
Eleanor Ray, writer March 5, 2015
John Zurier’s work has been moving toward a sturdier sense of individuality, complicating his frequent categorization as a monochromatic painter. The works in his current show—the Berkeley- based artist’s fourth at Peter Blum—assert themselves as a cast of characters. The 14 oil and distemper paintings (all 2014 and 2015) move between the concrete and the suggestive, as indicated by their titles: half refer to specific locations, and the other half to seasons or times of day. Zurier has long worked in a range of sizes, and only two paintings here have the same dimensions. They are not vast and ungraspable; even the largest, around 78 × 48 inches, feels approachable in scale. Human-sized and firmly material, these paintings function as equivalents, pieces of weather brought inside as figures, each with an insistent specificity of format and surface character.
John Zurier, “Stapi” (2014). Oil on linen, 20 x 24”. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York.
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The emphasis remains on vocation rather than evocation. The frequent appearance of carefully ruled lines, as in “Before and After Summer”and “Héraðsdalur 3,” inflect the paintings’ surfaces with man-made deliberation, without which the images might fall into misty vagueness. These sharp horizontals and verticals are countered by the soft edges of the paintings, their corners often folded. Such details project the artist’s awareness of the cumulative force of decision-making; intention betrays itself at every moment. In total, the finely calibrated choices communicate beyond intention. The play between deliberation and chance echoes the paintings’ perpetual alternation between the clearly visible and the possibility of something latent, recalling the dilemma expressed in Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”—whether to prefer “The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendoes, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after.”
“Before and After Summer,” one of the largest paintings, demonstrates Zurier’s sensitivity to temperature and touch. The densely brushed vertical expanse shifts from cool blue-green to a warmer earth-green and back, while two opaque areas at the top edge, painted in milky blues of distinctly opposing temperatures, suggest pieces of sky. The whole field feels surprisingly close-at-hand. In other works, hints of horizon lines tease the perceptual inclination to read landscape elements. This happens most overtly in “Stapi,” where a dark central band asserts itself initially as a field of trees. From farther away, though, the central frieze dissolves into a change in temperature and surface inflection.
The paintings often suggest weather events poised on the edge of arrival, like a bank of fog or a snowstorm just offshore—especially where the images appear off-register, wrapping partly around the edge of the canvas, as in “Afternoon (S.H.G.).” The bolder colors of “Héraðsdalur 12 (Lighthouse)” and, in the back room, the pink “Héraðsdalur 19,” serve to reveal by contrast the greater lushness here of more reduced color situations. In “At Halvalsnes,” the sparest painting, a thin distemper ground yields a densely varied air mass, grounded only by fingerprint-sized blue-green marks on either side, like handles—handheld weather.
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John Zurier, “At Havalsnes” (2014). Distemper on linen, 24 x 28”. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York.
John Zurier’s paintings benefit from being seen in a group. They make each other intelligible, the way our experiences of different seasons and times of day are revealed in relation to each other. Certain experiences are made most visible in moments of incremental change, as each new state reveals the previous one. It feels necessary then that this group be somewhat uneven, with seemingly literalist outliers like “Héraðsdalur 12 (Lighthouse)”offering fewer rewards for close-up engagement than are available elsewhere. “Lighthouse”’s impenetrable opacity acts as a signpost pointing you back to the other paintings.
Richer paintings like “Before and After Summer and Untitled (Spring)” exist in a realm of fluctuation less certain than the typical progress of seasons and daylight, except in those extremes common in Iceland, where the artist has spent a significant amount of time in recent years. The alternately dissolving and resolving clarity of these paintings recalls extremely short winter days, when it might be unclear at any given moment whether the day is ending or still beginning.
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John Zurier
The American painter translates the barren splendor of Iceland into foggy gray, moss, ochre, and icy blue. Don’t expect sublime landscapes; only one of these fourteen works has anything like a horizon line. In his satisfyingly scuff abstractions – three blue stripes or an imperfectly perpendicular cross –
Zurier has one eye on the view from his studio and the other trained on the private and knotty terrain of emotion. Through April 4.
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Here are the Nominees for The 2014 AICA Awards
By The Editors of ARTnews Posted 02/27/15
Best Monographic Museum Show Nationally
John Zurier: MATRIX 255 UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA Curated by Apsara DiQuinzio
Also nominated:
Beatriz Milhazes: Jardim Botanico / Perez Art Museum, Miami / Curated by Tobias Ostrander Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness / Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago / Curated by Matthew S. Witkovsky
Pierre Huyghe / Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles / Curated by Jarrett Gregory
Keith Haring: The Political Line / deYoung Museum, San Francisco / Curated by Dieter Buchhart
Simon Starling: Metamorphology / MCA Chicago, Chicago / Curated by Dieter Roelstraete / June 7– November 6, 2014
Richard Estes’ Realism / Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. / Curated by Patterson Sims, Jessica May, and Virginia Mecklenburg Dear Nemesis, Nicole Eisenman / ICA, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia / Curated by Kelly Shindler / September 19–December 28, 2014
Mel Chin: Rematch / New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans / Curated by Miranda Lash / February 21– May 25, 2014
Robert Motherwell: The East Hampton Years, 1944-1952 / Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, N.Y. / Curated by Phyllis Tuchman
Robert Smithson’s New Jersey / Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, N.J. / Curated by Phyllis Tuchman and Gail Stavitsky
For more information: http://www.artnews.com/2015/02/27/here-are-the-nominees-for-the-2014-aica-awards/
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Painter John Zurier stirs memories with color, light December 10, 2014 Rachel Howard, writer
John Zurier mounts a painting on a canvas stretcher at his Oakland studio. His works are often monochromatic.
When John Zurier was a boy growing up with his father’s art collection, he used to watch the colors on the canvases change over the course of a day and “wonder what the paintings did at night.”
In his West Oakland studio, the pale light from high windows casting a calm glow on his work and on the white curls of his hair, Zurier still has a boyish playfulness in his brown eyes. You might not expect that mischievous energy from photo reproductions of the 34 works in his first-ever solo museum show, at the Berkeley Art Museum. The large, mostly monochrome paintings look flat when reduced to pixels, and the curatorial notes threaten a severe intellectual experience with their talk about Zurier’s absorption in “the object quality of his paintings.”
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But in his studio, as in the open second-floor gallery of BAM’s current building at Bancroft and College (which will close Dec. 21 as the museum moves to a new location), Zurier’s paintings come alive. They beckon the eye with faint marks. As your senses absorb the subtle colors, and begin to trace the movement of the marks deeper into the linen’s weave, you might find yourself on the edge of a forgotten memory, or in a dreamlike state.
That’s what happened to Zurier, 58, when he saw his first Rothko painting in the flesh. “I was being very analytical, trying to figure out what Rothko actually did,” Zurier says. “And the next thing I knew I was overcome by a feeling which I hadn’t prepared for. And that’s what I’m interested in: the feeling that come after spending time with the work.”
Zurier was 20 when he saw that Rothko, after coming to UC Berkeley for a degree in landscape architecture. Though he grew up in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, and his dad’s collection included works by such heavyweights as Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell and Richard Diebenkorn, Zurier wasn’t reared in the academic art world; his father sold copper tubing and his mother was a flight attendant. Zurier didn’t take a painting class until his junior year in college.
Then, in his first class with Joan Brown, Zurier knew painting was what he wanted to do. Soon another professor, Elmer Bischoff, became a mentor, guiding Zurier’s adventures in abstraction, though Zurier’s approach was to be entirely different from the New York Abstract Expressionists from whence Bischoff sprang.
“Elmer gave me this idea that you could find the color tone of the paintings – all the colors work together to create a very specific tone, and once that’s found, you could do almost anything,” Zurier says. “The color mood could develop, and then you could move into that space.”
He hand-mixes his pigments (his work table holds swatches of linen with a dozen watery blue dots), often combining them in animal glue to create a paint called distemper that BAM curator Apsara DiQuinzio says creates a “faint glimmer due to the rabbit skin gesso he uses.” The paintings in the Matrix 255 show range from barely-there whites with blue spots that recede like wave horizons on a lake, to glowing oranges and innocent turquoises. The method of creation matters less, Zurier says, than the complex reaction a viewer has to the colors.
“We register color as a thing, and then our memories associate with that color, and that causes a double feeling, registering the color first and then experiencing these subjective memories,” he says. “I want all these associations to come up. A memory on the verge – for me, that’s a pleasurable sensation.”
The play of light on San Francisco Bay was a major factor in his decision to settle permanently in Berkeley, where he worked as a preschool teacher and art supply cashier to support himself, finally becoming an adjunct professor for the California College of the Arts. But all the paintings in the Matrix show are inspired by Iceland. CCA asked Zurier to teach a summer painting class anywhere he wanted in 2011, and remembering a horseback riding trip he once took with his wife, Nina Zurier, a photographer, he chose the far-north country.
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“It’s a very cold light there,” he says. “The effect is so subtle that there often isn’t a lot of strong contrast. And there’s a long extended twilight that lasts till 1:30 in the morning. I like the challenge of, ‘How can I re- create this light, which is so low contrast?’” He now stays in Iceland for three months every summer.
Still, though the light may be the visual manifestation, the experience of the painting, for Zurier as for the viewer, is a private reverie. For example, a painting titled “Finnbogi” – pale gray with a diagonal of robin’s egg blue in the top left corner, began as just a color Zurier felt drawn to – until, deep into the work on that painting, Zurier recalled an earlier painting he had made inspired by a building of that color in Iceland, which had since been torn down.
“So it ended up being a memory of a painting of a memory that no longer existed,” he says. No doubt that painting, like the paintings Zurier grew up with, does wily, elusive things in the night.
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John Zurier on Iceland, Light, and Landscape
October 6, 2014 Matthew Harrison Tedford, writer
Berkeley-based painter John Zurier’s first solo museum exhibition, Matrix 255, on view at the Berkeley Art Museum, includes twenty-two new paintings that demonstrate a subtle effect on the viewer, which builds the more time one spends with the work. Stark simplicity gives way to an understanding of the hours, weeks, and months of work that go into these paintings. Nearly imperceptible brushstrokes are unearthed only if one wishes to find them. Slight changes in color tone yield the power to create emotions or summon associations.
The works in Matrix 255 all arise from Zurier’s time painting in Iceland and are embedded with personal experiences, emotions, and recollections. Viewers can sometimes gain access to these elements through contemplation or through the works’ titles, but just as often one would need entry into Zurier’s private thoughts. Though the paintings may appear to be total abstractions, they are grounded quite firmly in the Icelandic landscape and Zurier’s experience there. The lines, paint drops, and blurs in each of these pieces insinuate some specific phenomenon, location, or impression. I sat down with Zurier to talk about Iceland and how it materializes in his work.
MHT: I’m interested in this idea of you working in a landscape rather than depicting the landscape itself. Can you tell me what this means for your work?
JZ: For me, you experience nature whole. It just comes to you. With the landscape, the things you can’t reproduce are what are interesting to me. You’re dealing with these forces and energies and
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I worked for a couple of years in Iceland making watercolors, but I wasn’t making paintings. It took me a while to figure out how I could make paintings there. One of the things that draws me to Iceland is the light, which is so different for me growing up in California. In California, it’s a really intense Mediterranean light with really strong contrasts. In Iceland, there’s very little contrast in the lights, and some of the things are so subtle. For example, the ocean at twilight will often be lighter than the sky, and there are these subtle color contrasts that happen that are almost at the threshold of visibility. I thought, “How can you paint something like this?” John Zurier, Afternoon (S.H.G.), 2014; Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York.
MHT: Much of your work in Matrix 255 was created in Iceland. What’s your relationship with the country and how did that start?
JZ: My wife Nina and I went to Iceland in 2001 on a horseback trip. We rode through the center of Iceland in the highlands. It was one of the most moving trips of my life. But I didn’t go back until 2011. California College of the Arts asked me to teach a summer class there and I knew I wanted to go back. As soon as I got there, I realized it was perfect. I knew I wanted to be there. We’ve been there for the last four summers, arriving in late May to teach a class for students from CCA, and then Nina and I stay on through July and then go back for Christmas.
MHT: I was only aware of you going in the summer. Are any of the works inspired by your experiences in the winter as well? I imagine that changes things completely.
JZ: Some of the watercolors were made in the winter in Reykjavík. And predominantly the works made in Iceland were made during the summer. The winter gets into the work. A lot of the way I work is through memory of things — memory of color, experiences. I come back and start a painting and it’s through the painting of it that I realize, “Oh, I know where this is. I know what this is. This relates to this point here.” So I can’t say what is winter experience versus what is a summer experience. It’s very important to have two experiences, between this extended period of light and then this real short period of light, which is very, very dark.
MHT: Can you tell me a little bit about Héraðsdalur, which many of the paintings are named after.
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JZ: That group of work is titled after the farm, where I was living and working this past summer. Héraðsdalur is located in a broad valley in the north of Iceland in a region called Skagafjörður. I met a group of Icelandic artists this summer and they talked about the special light in Skagafjörður. It’s famous for its light.
They told me a story about a nineteenth-century painter from Denmark who came to Skagafjörður because he had heard about the light and wanted to paint this famous light. He got himself a hotel room in the town nearby. Everyday he’d go out, set up his easel, and start a painting. He did this every day for a month and then one day he just packed everything up and went home. He couldn’t capture the light. This is what I was trying to say. The light is the thing that is the most subtle and the most interesting. It’s so special and yet it can’t be captured. How do you put it into form? John Zurier, Icelandic Painting (12 Drops), 2014; Collection of the artist. MHT: I sense this sort of solitude or unsentimental loneliness in many of these works. Is that something that’s in the landscape too?
JZ: I didn’t go to Iceland searching for unsentimental sense of solitude, but I certainly found that when I was there. I think that’s one of the things about landscape. When you see landscapes of Iceland it’s usually spectacular. It’s usually these amazing waterfalls and amazing glaciers, and I’m not really interested in that kind of picturesque quality. Up in Skagafjörður it’s softer, it’s different.
MHT: It seems that names have an important role in your work and could even impact how one feels about a particular painting. For example, I might feel differently about Summer Still (The Same Shadow), which is one of my favorite works in the exhibition, if it was named Across the Riveror Avalanche, which both seem reasonable for that work. For you, what’s the relationship between a painting and the title you eventually give it?
JZ: It’s often a very specific memory for me. I feel John Zurier, Summer Still (The Same Shadow), the title can give a different entry into the work. For 2014; Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Duchamp, he thought a title was like adding another Gallery, New York
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY color. But the titles have to fit with the energy of the painting. I couldn’t call it Avalanche because it doesn’t have anything to do with it, even though they seem as if they could be random. They’re not random to me at all. Summer Still has to do with the kind of movement and stillness within.
But also, the “Summer Still” was also this idea that it is still summer. It’s a sudden realization that summer isn’t over. It also relates to a poem from an Icelandic poet named Stefán Hörður Grímsson. He has a poem called “Summer Still” and I really wanted to use this title, but I’d used it already for another painting, so that’s why it’s parenthetical. It seemed to me that when you say “Summer Still” and then you call it “The Same Shadow,” somehow those lines get activated.
In the case of Avalanche, I stretch the canvas, it’s primed, and it’s sitting over on the side of the wall. I’m looking at it and I want to do something on it, but I have to just wait for a while. So I’m working on other things and then once I look at it out of the corner of my eye and all of a sudden I see these things appear. It’s as if all of a sudden, I could take this whole image and put it down.
But also there was this feeling of instability. [The lines in the painting] are not perfectly poised formal balances. There’s something a little bit fragile about them. There are avalanche protectors up on the hills and the fjords, especially in a town near where I was staying. It’s a very steep fjord and the towns are right at the bottom; they are prone to being destroyed by avalanches. So they built these structures and they’re in these angles that just go up. It reminded me of that — something that seems so tenuous and fragile but is able to hold some big force.
MHT: Avalanche was another work I wanted to talk John Zurier, Héraðsdalur 13 (Avalanche), 2014; Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum about in relationship to this idea of the title being an Gallery, New York. entry. When I first approached that work, before looking at the title, I didn’t feel what I would associate with the violence of an avalanche. But then after seeing the title I stared at the painting a little longer. Then, as opposed to the instability you felt, I could sense a sort of calm or quietness after an avalanche.
JZ: That’s really interesting because I realize I do this for myself and I wonder how is this going to be perceived. I realize that I have my own relationships with the paintings. Someone else will relate to them too, but they’re going to bring something completely different. None of this was thought out in a logical way. I wasn’t thinking about the calm after the avalanche because avalanches are horrific. You’re in this town, it’s a beautiful sunny day, and you see these things that are there to protect and to stop. It’s essentially this thing that’s waiting for some incredible force. It’s this fragile object that could be destroyed so quickly. In a way, I think painting is like that.
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And Lighthouse… You title it Lighthouse and all of a sudden it’s easy to see it as a representation of a lighthouse, of a color. Some of the lighthouses in Iceland are painted that orange. But I just like the idea of a “lighthouse.” Just the word itself. The house does exactly what it does: it emits light. And that painting emits light. It’s very, very opaque. The way it’s so solid and it emits light… it just felt right.
MHT: That was another title that I thought was interesting. When I saw the work and its title it made sense. It’s vertical, it’s kind of the color of a light, and so it makes sense. Then afterwards I read in the brochure that this is the color of many lighthouses in Iceland. And because I compulsively look everything up, I went home and looked up Icelandic lighthouses and saw these images with glaciers, icebergs, the sea, and then these totally incongruously colored lighthouses. The painting then worked on another level in the exhibition because it too stood out against the mostly light blues and greens, as if the whole gallery was that landscape. So it made sense on one level, but when I learned a little bit of the back story it had an additional meaning.
JZ: What I love is that you think about this the way I do. I’m like, “Oh, I like this so I’m going to look up this and I found out this,” and then all of a sudden these John Zurier, Héraðsdalur 12 (Lighthouse), meanings start to develop. I love the idea that you can 2014; Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum have a painting in a show that will illuminate all the Gallery, New York. other paintings. So that if you just had a series of paintings and you add one painting to it all of a sudden it makes us look at all the other paintings differently.
John Zurier / MATRIX 255 runs through December 21, 2014 at the Berkeley Art Museum.
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Art reviews: John Zurier in Berkeley
October 31, 2014 Kenneth Baker, writer
The Berkeley Art Museum’s curators have set the light level noonday high in a large gallery devoted to a solo show of Bay Area painter John Zurier, No. 255 in the institution’s long-running Matrix series.
The brightness favors various paintings whose dark tonalities will not disclose their details under light any less intense. It also serves as a cue, which too few visitors may recognize, that these works demand extraordinary scrutiny.
If no one has yet anointed Zurier a “painter’s painter,” someone inevitably will. It sounds like a compliment, like praise of a restaurant that chefs frequent after hours, but people tend to read it as a caution that something forbiddingly esoteric awaits them.
In fact, Zurier’s paintings present themselves as disarmingly open to dismissal — as possibly self-involved, lacking in discernible content, fatally indifferent to reception. John Zurier, Summer Still (The Same Shadow), The thought of self-involvement cuts closest to relevant 2014, oil on linen response because, deliberately or not, it recognizes Zurier’s process of observing and responding to the fine material and expressive details of each painting as it evolves.
The dimensions of a working surface, its texture — from light or heavy linen to coarse jute — the way the fabric weave takes an oil color or distemper, and the atmospherics of an emergent picture space — all these qualities may get overlooked or considered arbitrary by viewers in a hurry or liable to confuse looking with scanning. But they are at the center of Zurier’s attention as he works,
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The care given at the BAM to the placement and sequence of Zurier’s paintings, undoubtedly with his involvement, gives visitors another sort of prompting to bear down on the works’ material specifics.
The overriding question the paintings pose, though, is whether we can slow down to the tempo of observation that they set.
Underlying the adventures of Zurier’s hand, his eye for color and other constructive obsessions is an education in art that surfaces in details and affinities he probably does not track consciously.
He may not have thought of Matisse when painting the teal green band that laps across fog-gray “Finnbogi” (2014), but to the mind of anyone who knows the French master’s work, it will recall Matisse’s “Shaft of Sunlight, The Woods of Trivaux” (1917).
Similarly, Zurier may not have studied the sparely punctuated color fields of Raoul De Keyser (1930-2012), but Zurier’s “Héraðsdalur 13 (Avalanche)” (2014) and “Icelandic Painting (12 Drops)” (2012) seem to transmit echoes of them.
Possible allusions to artists as diverse as Barnett Newman, Edvard Munch and Robert Motherwell also drift through this selection of Zurier’s work, signs not of homage or influence but of a prodigious knack of internalizing painters’ ambitions in which Zurier’s art silently offers to initiate us.
Kenneth Baker is The San Francisco Chronicle’s art critic.
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John Zurier: "Once I get there, I know where I am."
July 26, 2013 John Seed, writer
Painter John Zurier -- whose exhibition A spring a thousand years ago was recently on view at Peter Blum Gallery -- is attracted to the idea of spareness. One of his stated goals as a painter is to achieve "...the maximum sense of color, light, and space with the most simple and direct means."
Zurier's works coax viewers into a state of heightened awareness while offering few references: they are cleansing, enticing and poetic.
I recently interviewed John via e-mail and asked him about his background, his working methods and his ideas.
John Seed Interviews John Zurier
John Zurier
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John, you were raised with fine modern paintings around you. Can you mention a few of the things that your parents collected and describe how their presence affected you growing up?
My parent's art collection had an immense influence on my life. That is how I first learned about abstraction and color and surface -- all things I am concerned with in my own work now. I was very lucky to have been able to live with them when I was young. There were paintings by Joan Miró,
Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Antoni Tàpies, Alfred Leslie, Norman Bluhm, and Richard Diebenkorn. But at the core of it were paintings by the German Expressionists and some of the American abstract artists from Stieglitz's group.
The four that made the biggest impression on me were a large painting of a dancing girl by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a watercolor by Oskar Kokoschka, Marsden Hartley's painting called the The Warriors from 1913, and Arthur Dove's painting Moon. Dove often made his own paint and frames and for some reason this was very appealing to me, and I think that is where I got my interest in materials. I loved the thin, dry paint Dove used in Moon. There is a brushstroke at the bottom of the painting that is both odd and brilliant. I used to wonder why it was there and how he did it. I'm still thinking about it.
Diebenkorn was probably the one I looked at the most, though. We had paintings from his Urbana and Berkeley series, and what I love about Diebenkorn is that his method is always on the surface: you can really see it all right there.
Filadelfia, 2012 distemper on linen 21 x 23 in. (53.3 x 58.4 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York
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You had some important mentors -- I know Elmer Bischoff was one -- can you mention some of your teachers and talk about their importance?
I went to UC Berkeley and I studied with Joan Brown, Sidney Gordon, Robert Hartman, Jim Melchert, and Elmer Bischoff. Elmer was the most influential in terms of painting, and he taught me a lot about color, surface modulation, and the importance of mood. He had a great way of talking about feeling, intuition, and poetics, and that how a painting is made is also its content. He talked a lot about the "information" in Toulouse-Lautrec's and Edvard Munch's paintings; and the color harmonies of Titian's late works.
After Paolo Schiavo, 2013 oil on linen 17 x 21 in. (43.2 x 53.3 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York
Your paintings over the years have been sensitive to light, color and atmosphere: is it correct to say that you are now flirting with form?
I don't think so. Even when I put shapes or lines in a monochrome field, I am thinking of form in the largest sense -- as how something is made. Form, for me, means dealing with the total construction of a painting, not geometry or making a picture of something. I'm very interested in how compositional formats and motifs, and even incidents in a painting can trigger perceptual responses and associations. Even a horizontal line can be read as a landscape, but it's not my intention.
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Öxnadalur, 2013 oil on linen 72 x 44 in. (182.9 x 111.8 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York
Tell me about some of your experiments with media.
I often make my own paints and grounds and I'm always discovering new things. My interest in materials involves looking for the right color and how the surface affects the way light is reflected or absorbed. I use various types of raw cotton and linen canvas and pay close attention to the different colors and textures of the weave. I also sometimes use pre-primed linen. I will also grind my own oil colors and I make tempera paint by mixing pigments into animal glues. I do a lot of research and make tests. It's part craft, part chemistry, and part like cooking. But as a rule, I try to keep the materials in a painting simple.
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Sorgin, 2013 oil on linen 21 x 15 in. (53.3 x 38.1 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York
How did you first travel to Iceland, and how have your travels there made an impact on your paintings?
Larry Rinder had been telling me about Iceland for several years, and in 2002 my wife and I went with him and a group of friends on a 6-day horse riding tour. I loved Iceland, but for some reason I didn't manage to come back again until 2011. I'm in Reykjavik as I am writing this (at the end of July) and I have been here since mid-May. The landscape and light have been a huge influence on my work. Also the people, the language, literature, music, poetry, and art have made a big impact. An Icelandic friend told me about a story by Guðbergur Bergsson, about a man who grew up at the foot of a mountain. He moved away and missed the mountain so much he had a painting made of it. He moved back to his old home at some point, and he would sit in his house with the shades drawn and look at the painting of the mountain. I love this story -- with its memory and longing it feels very Icelandic to me, and it reads almost like a chapter out of Kenko's Essays in Idleness.
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Svartur Klettur 2, 2012 glue tempera on linen 108 x 75 inches (274.3 x 190.5 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York
Can you tell me about the poetry that inspired some of your recent work?
Bill Berkson and his poems are inspiring to me. They have lightness, depth, and grace. In 2011 we made a book together called Repeat After Me, published by Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco. Bill gave me the poems of an unpublished book to read and I made watercolors on Japanese notebook paper. Lately, I've been reading Icelandic poets in translation, mostly the modernist poets Steinn Stenarr, Jón Úr Vör, Thorsteinn frá Hamri, and Ingibjörg Haraldsdóttir. I especially like Stefán Hördur Grimsson. I made two paintings with titles from Grimsson's poems. The title of my recent show at Peter Blum Gallery in New York, A spring a thousand years agocomes from a Stefán Hördur Grimsson poem.
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A spring a thousand years ago, 2012 glue tempera on cotton 72 x 44 in. (182.9 x 111.8 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York
How important has Japanese art been to your development?
It's been very important. I started reading about Japanese gardens when I was in high school and that lead me to study landscape architecture at Berkeley. But it took some time for me to realize that my interest in gardens was mostly metaphorical, and that the traditional Japanese aesthetic principals of simplicity, suggestion, incompleteness, and impoverishment, could be guiding principles for my painting.
One of my favorite Japanese terms is jinen or "naturalness." It means things as they really are, or from the beginning to be made so without any calculation, as in water runs downwards and fire goes upwards. It's not intellectual and can't be conceptualized. The paradox is that if one talks about it too much it then becomes calculated.
Around 1994, I became interested in the color grey and the Japanese concept of "killed colors." This involves the elimination of color by darkening it or thinning it down so that it hovers almost at the extreme limit of visibility. This is how I came to monochrome--not out of minimalism and post- painterly abstraction. I like the idea that in Japanese painting monochrome painting is the closest thing to emptiness.
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Mosfellsbær, 2012 distemper and oil on linen 26 x 21 in. (66 x 53.3 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York
Where do you see your work going?
I was traveling with some friends, and one of them was supposed to be in charge of getting us from point A to point B to point C etc. His intuition was good, and he was familiar with the place, but he was not good with directions, as it turned out. We would drive for a while, and then he would say, "Aha! So this is where we are." That is more or less how things go for me. Once I get there, I know where I am.
Note:
John Zurier's next exhibition at the Claes Nordenhake Gallery in Berlin opens on September 20th.
The original article can be found at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/john-zurier_b_3652376.html
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June 24, 2013
Linger awhile with abstract paintings in several sizes and mediums—the most striking, dry and luminous distemper—that seem at first to rehearse old looks of brushy monochrome, sometimes inflected with a rough dividing line or drifting patches of another hue. The formal vocabulary is indeed ordinary, but its articulation proves poetic in slow-acting, ultimately moving ways. You might not have guessed that the occasion of most of the works was a sojourn of the artist’s in Iceland but once the fact is revealed, it becomes almost obvious. The pale, quakingly sensitive colors, in austere formats, evoke eked-out transports of a hard place. Through June 22.
(Peter Schjeldahl)
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May 26, 2013
One Foot In The Sublime: John Zurier at Peter Blum
John Zurier: A spring a thousand years ago at Peter Blum
April 25 to June 22, 2013 20 West 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues New York City, 212 244 6055
Installation shot of the exhibition under review. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York
Particularity: some paintings have it, some don’t. In a painting that has it, specific material and visual attributes eclipse whatever genre, medium or aesthetic ideology that work might embody. The viewer’s experience of such a painting is rooted in the minutia of its physical constitution, rather than in its significance as a statement of purpose, an intellectual position, a conception of space, or what have you. Particularity is located somewhere in triangulation with Michael Fried’s “presentness” and John Waters’ definition of beauty as “looks you can never forget.”
And there is sometimes a fine line between particularity and its absence, as John Zurier’s current exhibition at Peter Blum’s new 57th Street space demonstrates. On view are 11 paintings dated 2012 or 2013 and one from 2007. In that earlier oil on linen, Oblaka (for Mark), a pale bluish film of paint is methodically but imperfectly scraped over viridian green underpainting, leaving green glitches that might remind you of fingerprints on a steamy mirror, or skittering fish beneath the water’s surface. The painting measures 38 by 31 inches. What is interesting to me is that the six paintings in the exhibition that are smaller than
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Oblaka (for Mark) are far more memorable than the five that are larger, and the difference, I think, is owing to the smaller paintings’ particularity.
The very smallest canvas, Sorgin (21 by 15 inches), painted in a close range of pungent reds, attests to Zurier’s coloration of touch. A dense, though not particularly thick, cloud of brushstrokes — both fast and slow, fat and lean — gives way to raspy pinkish areas at top and bottom where the brush has barely swept the surface, or missed it entirely. A faint impression of the stretcher bars, which painters generally try to avoid, inflects this quizzical painting’s skin with a reminder of its rudimentary mechanical infrastructure.
Öxnadalur (oil on linen, 72 by 44 inches) is ten times the size of Sorgin, but that size does not translate into a commanding sense of scale. To be sure, it is beautifully painted—in a silvery-purplish gray broadly worked wet-into-wet over a whitish ground—but it lacks the density of Sorgin’s material factuality. The paintings do, however, have in common a faint representational suggestion: a rough trail, angling up from the bottom edge (hence into pictorial space) and into a bosky wood indicated by silhouetted treetops.
John Zurier, A spring a thousand years ago, 2012 Oil on linen, 72 x 44 inches Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York
This footpath scenario is even more distinct in A spring a thousand years ago, a painting in glue tempera on cotton. Brushily painted in a watery slate blue, the image exhibits just enough variety in mark making to break down spatially into the classic foreground/middle ground/background landscape organization. The inclination to interpret sparse compositional cues as a representation of believable space is more interesting as a study in the psychology of perception than as metaphor for the act of painting as a trek into unfamiliar territory. In any case, what particularity this painting possesses emerges not from the spectral sylvan iconography but from a few slightly discordant, strictly ruled horizontal and vertical brushstrokes that echo the painting’s framing edge.
A less literal order of narrative is embedded in the odd Mosfellsbœr (distemper and oil on linen), where the fabric support itself, puckered along the right side as it meets the stretcher, contributes to the story of the work’s making. A translucent whitish wash, loosely applied, backs a constellation of five tiny black rectangles
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John Zurier, After Paolo Schiavo, 2013 Oil on linen, 17 x 21 inches Courtesy artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York
The two largest paintings, Hellnar (108 by 75 inches) and Härnevi (75 by 108 inches; both distemper on linen) are the most generalized, nearly monochrome, and placid almost to the point of dissipation. While they may well have one foot in the sublime, so to speak, they nevertheless lack the visual crackle of, for example, After Paolo Schiavo. Named for a Quattrocento Florentine painter, this compact work (17 by 21 inches) succeeds in depicting an expansive, mysterious space in a very few variations on blue-black. It is horizontally bifurcated by a surprisingly concrete horizontal stroke of the brush, which, amidst the exhibition’s abundant atmospheric effects, looks solid enough to do chin-ups on. While Zurier’s quite lovely larger paintings may be seen as contemporary examples of lyrical abstraction or color field or neo-monochrome, a painting like After Paolo Schiavo defies categorization.
John Zurier, Sorgin, 2013 Oil on linen, 21 x 15 inches Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York
Stephen Maine
The original article can be found at: http://www.artcritical.com/2013/05/25/john-zurier/
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John Zurier at Peter Blum May 2013
Image courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery
When it comes to scale, an artist usually knows his or her strengths and sticks to one size or another. It’s a rarity to find an individual who has compelling aesthetic chops both when creating smaller as well as larger works. John Zurier is one individual who seems comfortable creating reductive abstractions in any size he sees fit.
As is readily evident in his exhibition of new paintings at Peter Blum Gallery, Zurier has a compelling ability to apply sensitively considered passages of muted color. Billed as monochromes, these works highlight Zurier’s acuity to touch and knowing when to pull back, never straying into stale waters. He works both in oil and distemper, a primitive blend of rabbit skin glue and raw pigment. His material decisions allow for meticulously implemented subtleties to steal the show. Hazy washes applied to the linen amount to cloudy abstractions opening up to spaces as vast as the viewer can imagine. His compositions are sparse and highly considered, while the artist’s sense of touch seems raw and immediate.
It is a show to be seen by anyone typically seduced by the importance of the hand. Selecting his painterly moves carefully, Zurier has carved out a niche for himself; one that is appreciated by those who find excitement in some good old visual poetry.
The original article can be found at: http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/?p=9933
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May 9, 2013
The Lookout: A Weekly Guide to Shows You Won’t Want to Miss
John Zurier, Vonin, 2012, distemper on linen, 18 x 22 inches. Courtesy Peter Blum.
With an ever-growing number of galleries scattered around New York, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Where to begin? Here at A.i.A., we are always on the hunt for thought-provoking, clever and memorable shows that stand out in a crowded field. Below is a selection of current shows our team of editors can’t stop talking about.
John Zurier at Peter Blum, through June 22
John Zurier walks a tightrope that stretches between everything and nothing. The dozen recent oil-on-canvas works in "A spring a thousand years ago," wispy, barely there monochrome compositions in gray, pale blue or mauve, at first seem utterly negligible. Yet their ethereal quality gives way on second look to a feeling of epic image-making. Major pieces, such as the luminous blue-green Hellnar and icy purple Öxnadalur, suggest dramas of nature-land-, sea- or skyscapes. With infinite ambitions and wry sophistication, Zurier makes even the most wan brushstrokes seem perfectly executed and profound.
David Ebony
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Top 10 from the Sao Paolo Bienal By David Ebony 9/25/12
This spring in São Paulo a number of prominent exhibitions are invigorating the art scene. A Caravaggio show generates daily lines around the block at the São Paulo Museum of Art downtown ["Caravaggio and his Followers," through Sept. 30]. The first-ever museum survey for Rio-based art star Adriana Varejão currently fills the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art in Ibirapuera Park [through Dec. 16.]. And the highly praised 30th São Paulo Bienal, "The Imminence of Poetics," recently opened in the adjacent Oscar Niemeyer Pavilion and the other sprawling galleries of the Bienal Foundation building plus a number of off-site venues [through Dec. 9].
South America's largest contemporary art survey, first launched in 1951, the São Paulo Bienal is the second oldest biennial in the world after Venice's (which began in 1885). In terms of scale, the São Paulo Bienal is manageable relative to its Venetian counterpart, but the main exhibition still requires at least a full day to see.
Curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas, the Venezuelan-born curator of Latin American art at New York's MoMA, with co-curators Andre Sévero, Tobi Maier and Isabela Villanueva, the Bienal features some 3,000 pieces by 111 artists from around the globe. Many works were created specifically for the show. In addition, the Bienal hosts an extensive program of performances and lectures. The loose yet effectively unifying theme of poetics has apparently afforded participating artists a larger dose of artistic license than usual in big international shows.
The curators arranged the show under several sub-categories, employing broad umbrella terms like "Survival," "Drifts," "Voices" and "Alterforms" that make almost anything possible. Rather than a theory-driven event, the Bienal struck me as an exhibition united by the creative act, an attitude toward art making that favors hands-on fabrication, low-tech devices and a meditative sensibility.
At the exhibition's entrance, Guy Maddin's pulsating multi-screen video projection of archival Hollywood footage and newly minted images pulls viewers in to meander through a network of some dozen large, freestanding screens. Prominent throughout the show are interactive displays and films and videos that highlight an individual's actions and interactions with others—or with the environment—instead of efforts geared toward more conventional narrative structures. Pioneers like Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson are at home here. And labor-intensive pieces prevail, such as the embroidered fabric compositions by New Yorker Elaine Reichek, as well as Michel Aubry's unforgettable re-
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY creation of fabled director and actor Erich von Stroheim's wardrobe-filled dressing room on the set of Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937).
The exhibition's strengths are in sculpture, installation and video. The curators seem not to have extended their generous poetic umbrellas to painters. Compared with other works on view, most of the paintings here are lackluster and subpar. Nevertheless, there were several highpoints in the medium, and a number of them were candidates for the Top 10. Here are the Bienal standouts:
6) John Zurier At first, John Zurier's barely-there abstract paintings seem derivative. They perhaps belong alongside the spare, abject paintings that critic Raphael Rubinstein has referred to in the pages of A.i.A. as "provisional painting." However, the California painter's large, wistful monochromes eventually seduce. Certain pieces, such a large (about 6-by-4 feet), deep viridian green composition, conjure a forest landscape by Casper David Friedrich. In these instances, it seems as if Zurier were fearlessly pursuing the sublime.
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected]