6.30 - 10.30 PM
MILAN | NEW SPACE
via Santa Croce 21
Opening: Thursday 19 January 2023
6.30 PM
Jerry Zeniuk | How to Paint
Thursday 19 January 2023 will mark the inauguration of ABC-ARTE ONE OF, a new space in Milan dedicated to the contemporary artistic idioms, as an extension of the traditional, historical ABC-ARTE gallery in Genoa.
The Milanese venue is situated in the picturesque setting of piazza Sant’Eustorgio, near important cultural institutions such as the Museo Diocesano and the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, an artist with whom ABC-ARTE collaborated for a long time on the occasion of an important solo show in the Genoese gallery featuring more than thirty monumental sculptures.
The new project ONE OF indicates the plurality of experiences to which the gallery will be dedicated from now on, a series of projects connected with the Genoese initiatives. This involves site-specific exhibitions inside a space with renewed and unprecedented connotations: the walls of ABC-ARTE ONE OF have been conceived to accommodate a single work per room, carefully selected with the artists themselves from those that best demonstrate, iconically, each artist’s historical inquiry.
The protagonist of this first and important edition is one of the founding fathers of analytic painting, Jerry Zeniuk, coinciding with his first Italian retrospective, hosted in the parallel gallery in Genoa. Curated by Flaminio Gualdoni with the evocative title How to Paint, this event marks the beginning of the official representation of this artist by ABC-ARTE.
Inspired by the series of works presented under the same title in 2017 in the Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, and the fundamental monograph edited by Henz Liesbrock, How to Paint opens a window onto Zeniuk’s recent reflection on colour and on its physical and mental capacity to generate spaces at a high qualitative level.
Zeniuk was key figure in what the Stedelijk Museum presented as Fundamental Painting in 1975. That event indicated the new direction in international minimalist painting for numerous artists as well as Zeniuk. The selection of works presented aims to confirm and broaden the artist’s research on the primacy of the painterly elements. Circles and dots with a strong chromatic and luminous valency float on a whitened or grey canvas, prefiguring a space in which the light is captured.
So it is with colour, a fundamental element capable of expressing social and human relations, that the Milanese experiment by ABC-ARTE begins. To cite the artist himself: ‘Colour releases emotions, and the pictorial space is a non-judgmental place that frames and contains these emotions so they may give access to a universal understanding’.
ABC-ARTE ONE OF will realise its wish to dedicate a part of its spaces to dynamic external collaborations in the field of experimental artistic inquiries and productions by hosting Italian pioneering digital art. Art Innovation: a gallery of digital art specialised in producing exhibitions by the leading international digital artists on large-scale LED screens, to coincide with the main innovative events of the global art system.
Artist biography
Born in 1945 in Bardowick, Lüneburg (Germany), to a family of Ukrainian refugees, Jerry Zeniuk moved with his parents to the United States in 1950, where he grew up in Colorado. After leaving school, he went to New York in 1969, where made his debut in 1972 with his first solo show in the Paley & Lowe gallery.
Since the 1970s he has lived permanently in Munich. He works with the Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf and Berlin, and with the Annemarie Verna gallery in Zürich. From 1992 to 2010 he taught at the Akademie der Bildende Künste in Munich.
The paintings of Jerry Zeniuk have met with appreciation since the 1970s, after his participation in the memorable 1975 collective show Fundamental Painting in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. At that time he was working on a monochrome plane, in layered compositions of juxtaposed contrasting colour planes. In 1977 he participated
in Documenta 6 in Kassel, and in 1999 he held retrospectives in the Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Kunstmuseum Winterthur and the Kunstmuseum Kassel, followed by the Karlsruhe Kunsthal in 2004. More recently his works have been shown in important public institutions such as the Augsburg Museum, Wiesbaden Museum, Bonn Kunstmuseum, Kunsthalle Bremen, Kunsthalle Hamburg, the Louisiana Museum, the Staatliche Museen Humlebaek, the Neue Galerie, the Kassel Pfalzgalerie, the Kaiserslautern Museum Ludwig, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen Cologne, the Städtische Galerie, Lenbachhaus Munich, the Sammlung Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung Munich, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Richmond, and The Maslow Collection Shaverton.
ABC-ARTE
Antonio Borghese, director of the ABC-ARTE Gallery, was born in Basel in 1983, grew up in Milan, and graduated there from the Università Commerciale Luigi Boccono in Economy of public administrations an international organisations. He has always cultivated his passion ever since he was young, driven by a strong and growing attraction to the major historical avantgardes from the postwar period to the 1980s.
Right from its foundation, ABC-ARTE has supported artists engaged in experimentation in different idioms and formats, with a preference for abstraction, particularly with a gestural turn. The gallery conducts in-depth research in its study of the work of international masters of the 20th century, exploring figures from the period of the neo-avantgardes whose quality is due for a critical reappraisal, consolidating long-term close collaborations.
In following this course, ABC-ARTE examined themes linked to performative happenings thanks to its connection with the founding masters of the Japanese avantgarde GUTAI, such as Shozo Shimamoto and Yasuo Sumi. It then went on to analyse currents linked with fundamental painting, or analytic painting as it is known in Italy today, with emblematic figures such as Jerry Zeniuk, Tomas Rajlich and Giorgio Griffa. ABC-ARTE continues to analyse these episodes in the discussion of the history of postwar art by means of such artists as
Hermann Nitsch, Georges Mathieu, Nanda Vigo, Claude Viallat and Bernard Aubertin. As for closer analysis of the events of the 1970s, the gallery also represents the famous performative photographer Michele Zaza. Each project implemented in the gallery (or supported in public institutions or museums) is accompanied by a bilingual volume in the series of ABC-ARTE publications, in collaboration with the artists themselves and with the contributions of international critics and curators.
ABC-ARTE ONE OF Jerry Zeniuk | How to Paint
Via Santa Croce 21, 20121 Milano 19 January 2023 – 1 March 2023
T. 02 89 76 80 94
press@abc-arte.com
www.abc-arte.com
