Firmly entrenched in a lineage beginning roughly with Reginald Marsh and tracing its way through David Hockney to Sean Landers, as well as Kai Althoff and the “bad girl“ painters of the New York 1990s like Sue Williams and Nicole Eisenman, painter Urban Zellweger crafts visual quips and mythological geographies in a fluid, illustrational style that plays on layered perception to enfold consistently changing and engaging stories. His style, on one hand, consciously echoes his teachers and praises them like a swotty student, but at the same time seems to have unhooked itself a long time ago and settled in its very own realm of strangeness. Each of the paintings is a mix of human interaction and organic abstraction, ranging from shape and line to narrative tableau. The fleshy vines that crawl and entwine across snails, butterflies, butterfly, chair and fly trace out strange human forms, their background coming through at some places like cloisonné, revealing deformed organica or a human face. This same theme is played in inside a hospital, a work depicting a doctor whose coat reveals an inner fantasy that is all at once a dreamscape, fleshscape and inner landscape. In all the works provocative ideas slide by at every turn, confrontation and farce walking hand in hand in a subversive strategy that creates combinations somehow full of both irony and complete seriousness.

Born in Zürich, Switzerland in 1991, Zellweger lives and work in Zürich. Recent solo exhibitions include "Urban Zellweger: Throb" at Pilar Corrias in New York; "Where am I Reptile" at Karma International in Los Angeles (2016); and "Plymidae" at Plymouth Rock, Zürich (2015). Recent group exhibitions include 89plus: “Filter Bubble”, LUMA Westbau, Zürich (2016); Europe Europe, Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo (2015); +, 1857, Oslo (2015); Barricades of Life, a Pool Outside, at Fri Art, Freiburg (2014); and 50/50, Ok?, Kunsthof Zürich, Zürich (2014).

Courtesy of Karma International