Born in 1945 in Germany in Bardowick as a son of Ukrainian refugees, he emigrated with his parents to the United States in 1950, where he grew up in Colorado. After his study he moved to New York, where he had his first solo exhibition in the Paley & Lowe gallery in 1972.
Since the seventies he has stayed regularly in Germany, participating in several exhibitions. He now lives in Munich and regularly shows at the Konrad Fischer Galerie Düsseldorf/Berlin, and at Annemarie Verna Zürich. Zeniuk became known in the seventies, when he participated in the landmark Fundamental Painting exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1975.
Since then his paintings have developed from a monochrome plane, in which several coloured layers have been superimposed, towards compositions of juxtaposed contrasting colour planes.
After participating in Documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977, in 1999 he held his first large-scale retrospective in the Lenbachhaus in Munich, as the Kunstmuseum Winterthur and the Kunstmuseum Kassel.
Colour is essential to the painting of Jerry Zeniuk, and “Beauty”, philosophically and visually, is the ultimate goal in his paintings. According to Zeniuk, colours are not only the bearers of emotion, but their interaction reflects social and human relationships in general as well.
His more recent canvases use different coloured circles or dots or forms to create colour interactions that create a specific pictorial space. They float on a whitish coloured or raw canvas, but suggest space that is occupied by the retained light. The edges of these dots are in some cases sharp, in others vague and atmospheric. They are brought into a harmonious equilibrium and have a strong spatial effect.
From 1992 to 2010 he taught at the Akademie der Bildende Künste Munich. In 1999 he had a retrospective of his work in Museum Lenbachhaus Munich, Kunstmuseum Winterthur and Kunstmuseum Kassel. A comprehensive catalogue was published on that occasion. In 2004 a retrospective of his watercolours was held in Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. In May 2012 an exhibition of his work opened in Museum Augsburg. In 2013/2014 an exhibition was planned in Museum Wiesbaden, and many other relevant institutions such as Augsburg Museum, Wiesbaden Museum, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Brema Kunsthalle, Amburg Kunsthalle, Louisiana Museum, Staatliche Museen Humlebaek, Neue Galerie, Kassel Pfalzgalerie, Kaiserslautern Museum Ludwig, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen Cologne, Städtische Galerie in the Lenbachhaus Munich, Sammlung Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung in the same city, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond and the Maslow Collection in Shaverton have exhibited his works.