Jerry Zeniuk | How to Paint

This book documents the first significant presence of Zeniuk in Italy, which also marks the start of the official representation of the artist by ABC-ARTE with the exhibition held in the historical Genoese gallery and the opening of the new Milanese space ABC-ARTE ONE OF.

We have decided to take the emblematic and incisive title of the most striking series of recent works, How to Paint. Presented in 2017 at the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop, accompanied by a fundamental monograph edited by Heinz Liesbrock published by Sieveking Verlag Munich, the series represents Zeniuk’s current reflection, based on colour and on its physical and mental capacity to generate spaces at a high qualitative level. From the first monochromes of the 1970s, well represented in the exhibition with extraordinary incunabula, to the current works, sequences of circles and dots that with the support variously create situations with a strong chromatic and luminous valency, Zeniuk confirms and broadens his concept of the primacy of the painterly elements in their infinite capacity to qualify vision.

Jerry Zeniuk is one of the key figures in the international Fundamental Painting movement: he showed in Geplante Malerei at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster in 1974, and in the following year he was a protagonist in Fundamental Painting at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

After participating in Documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977, in 1999 he held his first large-scale retrospective in the Lenbachhaus in Munich, as well as in the Kunstmuseum Winterthur and the Kunstmuseum Kassel. In 2004 a retrospective of his watercolours was held in Kunsthalle Karlsruhe.

In recent years his works are exhibited in relevant public institutions such as Augsburg Museum, Wiesbaden Museum, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Brema Kunsthalle, Hamburg 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.

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 interactions that create a specific pictorial space. They float on a whitish coloured or raw canvas, but suggest a space in which the light is retained. The edges of these dots are in some cases sharp, in others vague and atmospheric, brought into a harmonious equilibrium that generates a strong spatial effect.