Jerry Zeniuk

Jerry Zeniuk’s paintings draw on the philosophy of the Abstract Expressionists, borrowing their all-over compositions and making condensed gestures into expansive fields. Zeniuk’s oil paintings on linen are typically composed of brushy circular or dashed swathes of color, sometimes layering multiple colors together. The works are expressive, despite their sparseness, with jocular images combining repetitive, isolated gestures. Zeniuk began exhibiting in the early 1970s, straddling the end of Minimalism and the development of Imagism, which took the graphic, abstracted forms of recognizable subjects as its point of departure. Zeniuk’s Untitled #308, from 2010, is reminiscent of color field painting, despite the diffused and molecular appearance of its multicolored dots. Although the work is constructed of only a few dots suspended across an expanse of negative space, traditional compositional elements are clearly visible: the suggestion of space, light, visual movement, and tension between the parts and the whole.

Zeniuk has had several shows in Europe and the United States, including the Stedelijk Museum, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, the Picasso Museum in Muenster, Germany, and the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC.