John Zurier

John Zurier has said that one of his first painting problems was largely a failure: “I tried to paint the sky seen between two buildings so that the whole of my painting would be nothing but an empty blue space…I thought it would be very easy to do, but found it nearly impossible.” His reductive, near-monochrome paintings, watercolors, and prints evoke the ephemeral quality of nature and memory—like the slow swirl of sea foam, the fading tones of an echo, or the warmth of a spring haze. Informed by Abstract Expressionism, Japanese aesthetics, and the Icelandic landscape, he has expressed interest in “simplicity, surface modulation, and color” as they are “tied to our experience of time.”

As his interest in Japanese aesthetics continued to grow, the traditional principles of simplicity, suggestion, incompleteness, and impoverishment became foundations for his paintings. “One of my favorite Japanese terms is jinen or ‘naturaliness,’” Zurier has said. “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.”

John Zurier has exhibited in the United States and Europe. He participated in the 30th São Paulo Biennial in 2012, the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach in 2010, the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea in 2008, and the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 2002. Zurier was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010. 

Courtesy of Crown Point Press