John Zurier at his studio in Berkeley, California
"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."
— John Zurier
John Zurier’s paintings of atmospheric color fields examine qualities of evanescent light as well as solid radiance. Offering nuanced examples of the medium’s possibilities, Zurier pares down painting to the essentials with a sensory and allusive richness embedded in their asperity. The structural vocabularies and limited palette emphasize the beauty inherent in nature without reference to landscape. This subtle beauty is apparent in the subdued visual incidents of delicate inconsistencies in the executions of lines, marks, hues, and margins while demonstrating a deliberate emphasis on the wholeness of chromatic surface.
Over the past decade, Zurier’s time spent in Iceland has become a source and confirmation for the central concerns of his work: color, surface, light, and air. The surfaces of the paintings show evidence of their earlier states, with previous marks being revealed or scraped away, embedded in the weave of the canvas like memories of what was there before. Dots, dashes, and stray lines mark the folds of the linen—on the one hand reinforcing the materiality and parameters of the support, and on the other, implying an undefined ephemeral space. The subtle pitches and resonances within each surface heighten the awareness of place, time, and sensation. In this sense the paintings materialize as an event that activates anew with each viewer.
John Zurier was born in Santa Monica, CA in 1956, and lives in Berkeley, CA and Reykjavík, Iceland. He received his MFA in painting from the University of California, Berkeley (1984). Selected museum exhibitions include: Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden (2021); UC Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (2018 and 2014); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017); New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM (2016); Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME (2015). He has also exhibited at the 30th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2012); California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, CA (2010); 7th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2008); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, England (2003); and the Whitney Biennial, NY (2002). In 2010 he was awarded the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.
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