For the Frieze NY 2018 show Peter Blum Gallery will present a two-person exhibition featuring a portfolio of 14 archival pigment prints by the acclaimed filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky and a survey of paintings by John Zurier from the years 2000-2017. Through their works, both Zurier and Dorsky create occasions for reflection on light, landscape, and the passing of time.
Nathaniel Dorsky (Born 1943, New York) has been a renowned experimental filmmaker since 1963. We will exhibit the Arboretum portfolio, which extracts intimate moments of observation from his recently completed Arboretum Cycle films, shot between February and December of 2017 in San Francisco’s Arboretum. The 14 stills depict the changing states of the garden through the seasons and manifest as a metaphor for the stages of life: early childhood, youth, maturity, old age, and death. In his words, this series is focused on the “sacredness of the light itself in the sacred garden”. This portfolio is a crystallization of the meditative state achieved by Dorsky’s films.
Dorsky has presented his work at numerous institutions including: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Filmoteca Española, Madrid; Vienna Film Museum; Harvard Film Archive; Princeton University; Yale University; and the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and 2012.
John Zurier (born 1956, California) paints abstract almost monochrome paintings that are informed by Abstract Expressionism, Post-War French painting, and Japanese aesthetics. His main interest is in simplicity, surface modulation, and color as it is tied to our experience of time. Zurier’s soft-hued abstract paintings play at crossing the line into representation, at times alluding to various states of weather or sensory experiences of nature. In a recent review in the New York Times, Roberta Smith describes the paintings as “acts of full disclosure; (where) you see every decision, gesture and mark that went into their making. This is true of many foundational postwar painters, especially Jackson Pollock and Robert Ryman. But Mr. Zurier’s process is more intuitive and personal. No detail of a painting determines any other; you absorb each, oddity by oddity, fitting them into the whole, and into the experience of really looking.”
Zurier’s work can be found in numerous public collections including Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Berkeley Art Museum, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME.