"My paintings are titled after they are finished. Usually, they are reflections on transient themes, the seasons, weather, times of the day. Sometimes they have place names that evoke something of the painting’s source, and also can act for me as a destination locating the painting in a practical, emotional and spiritual way. The paintings come from an intuitive awareness, my understanding of art history and all the associations I carry with me––memories of landscapes, poetry and paintings.

Bolagil is a location and I connect this painting with that place. It is the name of a small river that flows from Mt. Esjan in Kjalarnes, Iceland."

— John Zurier

"Mr. Zurier’s paintings are acts of full disclosure; 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."

— Roberta Smith, "Galleries," The New York Times, 2017

"Color creates the space and meaning of my paintings. Finding the right tone and getting the pitch just right is everything. I think of paintings as tuning forks. The title, 'Ambiguous Argument about a Spring Cloud' is the remarkably precise title of a poem by Miyazawa Kenji, written in 1927. The last line is: 'The muddy, dark mass, / a catenary of warmed water, / that, I must tell you, is love itself –– / the interchange of carbon gas, / mendacious spring sensation, / that, I must tell you, is love itself.'"

— John Zurier

"Zurier generously offers us example after example of painting imbued with exquisitely nuanced demonstrations of its own possibility. Those nuances show in detail why no other medium is capable of providing comparable experience...Zurier's art sheds light on all that came before it but that it is not, while emitting light in corners of abstract painting yet to be fully explored."

— Robert Storr, "John Zurier: Painting Between Autumn and Spring," 2015

"In getting a surface to work, scraping away material, removing color, I’m aiming for sensuality and the immaterial energy at the core of art. 'For Mark (After Paul Celan)' is a double dedication: to my brother Mark and a reflection on a late untitled poem by Paul Celan. 'Chisel off the bolts of light, / Dusk has the swimming word.'"

— John Zurier

“While Zurier’s paintings are often inflected with his experience 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.”

— Erik Lindman, "John Zurier with Erik Lindman," The Brooklyn Rail, 2019

"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."

— John Zurier

"Simplicity, irregularity, incompletion, emptiness, naturalness are Japanese aesthetic principals that appeal to me, in part because they reverse ideals of Western aesthetics, making what can be seen as a weakness into a strength.

In 2010, I was able to spend a month in Kyoto, meeting with Nihonga painters to learn about traditional Japanese painting materials and the spiritual foundation for their use. While there, I visited Nishi Honganji, the Pure Land Buddhist Temple complex in Kyoto that houses one of Japan’s oldest Noh stages."

— John Zurier

"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."

—  Stephen Westfall, “Slow Painting,” Art in America, 2018

John Zurier was born in Santa Monica, CA in 1956. He lives in Berkeley, CA and Reykjavík, Iceland. Zurier received his MFA in painting from the University of California, Berkeley, CA (1984). Selected museum exhibitions include: Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden (2021); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2018); New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM (2016); Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME (2015); UC Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (2014). He has exhibited at the 30th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2012); California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA (2010); 7th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2008); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, England (2003); and the Whitney Biennial, New York, NY (2002). He has been awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2010).