November 12 – December 4, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, November 12, 5 – 9 pm
@ if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln St., Columbia, SC, (803) 238-2351.
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| An Organized System, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 in., $1,200 |
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| And Odd Incident, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 in., $1,730 |
At age 76, Lexington, S.C., artist Don Zurlo in September had his first solo exhibition in New York City. A selection from that exhibition at Viridian Artists gallery will be in Don Zurlo: The New York Exhibition at Columbia’s if ART Gallery, which represents Zurlo.
The intricacy, surface quality, use of color and complexity of composition in Zurlo’s work has varied considerably over the years, but most of his paintings have been rooted in the traditions of Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting and Minimalism. His current paintings gravitate toward Color Field and a kind of organic Minimalism. In them, Zurlo has overlaid thinly painted fields of colors, from wide expanses to mere slivers, or has them bud up against one another. The thin layers of paint and mixing of colors where two fields overlap result in the brighter works in a seductive luminosity, and in the darker ones, a transparent darkness. The fields’ edges are at the same time ragged, fluid and linear, creating forms that are at once amorphous and geometric and resemble torn paper. As such, the work relates to Zurlo’s student work in a late-1950s class under Allan Kaprow at Rutgers University, where he produced black-and-white torn-paper collages.
“In many ways, form is an illusion,” Zurlo says, “our interpretation of an infinite variety of relationships between fields of energy. In our search for meaning, our minds create images from these forces, filling in voids in our perception from the vast library of our personal impressions and experiences. We live in a world of illusions, attempting to assure ourselves we have a reasonable understanding of reality. By trying to create a balance between accidental events, conscious design and intuitive decisions, I strive to create visual metaphors for a transcendent existence, the dim reflection of an alternate reality.”
Aside from his undergraduate studies at Rutgers, Zurlo received an MFA from the university’s Douglass College. He has taught art at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg and Allen University in Columbia. Zurlo has exhibited at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, NJ, Trenton’s New Jersey State Museum, the Flint Institute of Art in Flint, MI, the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina and the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City and elsewhere.
