Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Painting
Website: johnzurier.com
John Zurier was born in 1956 in Santa Monica, California, and lives and works in Berkeley, California, and Reykjavík, Iceland. He received a BA in Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley in 1979 and an MFA in Painting from UC Berkeley in 1983, where he studied under Joan Brown and Elmer Bischoff. He is represented by Peter Blum Gallery in New York, Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin and Stockholm, and was long represented by Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco. His work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Moderna Museet Stockholm, the Colby College Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Oakland Museum of California, and others.
He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010. He first traveled to Iceland in 2002 at a friend’s suggestion and has returned almost every year since, maintaining a studio there and drawing deep inspiration from Iceland’s light, landscape, and poetry. He collaborated with Bay Area poet Bill Berkson — also a friend of many wiki artists — on the book Repeat After Me (2011). He is an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and co-curated the 2022 The Artist’s Eye exhibition at BAMPFA alongside Tammy Rae Carland, David Huffman, and Lava Thomas — all fellow artists in this wiki.
Zurier paints abstract, near-monochrome paintings in distemper, glue-size tempera, and oil on linen or raw canvas — quiet, luminous works whose colors range from muted tones of gray and white to vibrant, atmospheric hues of blue, pink, and green. Formally his work is not minimalist — his surfaces are touched, alive with the evidence of a brushstroke, a gesture, an applied and reconsidered layer — but it shares minimalism’s commitment to reduction, asking what a painting can be when stripped to its bare essentials: color, surface, and the mark. His sources are Japanese aesthetics, particularly the concept of jinen (“naturalness”) and the paintings of Ike no Taiga; the landscapes of Iceland; the poetry of Bill Berkson; and the traditions of West Coast abstraction that he absorbed studying under Joan Brown and Elmer Bischoff. He has described his core ambition with the traditional Japanese observation: “the most difficult thing to achieve in painting is creating a space where absolutely nothing has been painted.”
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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