In certain works, the oil paint is heavily diluted, allowing the weave of the canvas to remain visible. The surface shimmers like a distant flicker. Dense fields of pigment settle over underlying layers of color, creating a sense of stratification, depth, and layering. In some works, such as Half the Sky, lighter hues permeate dense fields of color like light piercing through a dark cloud cover. Nothing in these works is final. The colors remain in flux, as though they have not yet settled into their final state, an open, indeterminate stance that allows each mark to emerge from the moment and in response to what is given. This becomes especially evident in the triptych April, whose three panels appear like different states of a single moment, akin to the shifting phases of a mood. Greenish inflections run through the grey-blue surface. The colors appear coarse, at times washed out, seeming to conceal rather than reveal.
The paintings unfold in varying intensities. Some appear dark and nearly monochrome; only sparse, delicate gestures interrupt this impression. In Holding the Rain, by contrast, the paint almost dissolves: a cool, silvery-blue field settles across the canvas in visible brushstrokes like a fine veil, laced with an almost imperceptible quiver. The painting evokes rain, mist, or morning dew. Other works, such as the blue-violet, nearly closed pictorial spaces in April Earth condense into an almost impenetrable field of color that reveals subtle shifts and traces. Visible brushstrokes and dry impasto areas of paint ¬– whose quiet intensity recalls the tactile surfaces of the Welsh painter Gwen John – become signs on the canvas that we follow. The gaze finds no rest.
The titles suggest a specific place and moment in time, as if they were holding onto those instances that have inscribed themselves into our memory. They read like personal recollections or notes on a thought. Zurier’s painting refuses the motif; in its place emerges an atmosphere that can be apprehended rather than described. The gaze moves tentatively across the canvas, following concentrations of pigment, moments of clearing, and barely perceptible transitions. The coarse texture of the canvas, the visible brushstrokes, and the carefully built layers of color reveal Zurier’s interest in the material dimension of painting, the real and constitutive. He experiments with pigments and materials, which ultimately shape the mode of the brushwork.
The works in along – between move within an in-between state. They become the physical condensation of an inner state. The title itself plays with this interval, leaving something unsaid while seeming to compress meanings within it. Viewing Zurier’s paintings, we follow a shifting rhythm of appearance and disappearance: something briefly emerges before slipping away again.
John Zurier was born in 1956 in Santa Monica, USA and lives and works in Berkeley, USA and Reykjavik, Iceland.
A solo exhibition of recent paintings, “Far Again,” was presented at Moderna Museet, Malmö in 2021. Selected museum exhibitions include Currier Museum of Art, Manchester (2026), High Museum, Atlanta (2025), National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik, Stavanger Art Museum (both 2023), UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2022, 2018 and 2014); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017); New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe (2016); Colby Museum of Art, Waterville (2015). He has also exhibited at the 30th São Paulo Biennial (2012); California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art (2010); 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008); a show at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2003); and the Whitney Biennial, New York (2002).
In 2010 he was awarded the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. His work can be found in numerous public collections including UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Moderna Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, and others. A catalogue surveying his work from 1981 to 2014 with an essay by Robert Storr was published in 2015.
