Jerry Zeniuk, Paintings

Slewe Gallery Slewe Gallery is pleased to host the exhibition with new paintings by the Munich based American artist Jerry Zeniuk (*1945). The show opened Saturday February 22 and was scheduled to last until March 28, 2020. Due to the Corona measures the exhibition is extended until further notice. You can visit the exhibition temporarily by appointment only. You can listen to an interview with the artist by Robert van Altena on line here. 

Color is essential in the painting of Zeniuk. According to Zeniuk colors are not only carriers of emotion, but their interaction reflects social and human relationships in general as well. His recent canvases use different colored circles or dots or forms to create color interactions that create a specific pictorial space. They float on a whitish-grayish colored or raw canvas, that suggest space, occupied with light. The edges of these dots are in some cases sharp, in other vague and atmospheric. They are brought into a harmonious equilibrium and have a strong spatial effect. 'Beauty', philosophically and visually, is the ultimate goal in the paintings. Zeniuk became known in the seventies, when he participated at the Fundamental Painting show in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1975. Since then his paintings developed from a monochrome plane, in which several colored layers have been put on top of each other, towards compositions of contrasting color planes or dots next to each other.

Born in 1945 in Bardowick (DE), as a son of Ukrain refugees, Zeniuk emigrated with his parents to the United States in 1950, where he grew up in Colorado. After his study he moved to New York, where he had his first exhibition. Since the seventies he stayed regularly in Germany, participating in several exhibitions. Now he is living in Munich and he is regularly showing at Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf and Berlin, and at Annemarie Verna in Zürich. From 1992 to 2010 he was a teacher at the Akademie der Bildende Künste in Munich. In 1999 he had an overview of his work at the Museum Lenbachhaus in Munich, Kunstmuseum Winterthur (CH) and Kunstmuseum Kassel. In 2012/13 he had an overview of his works at Museum GlasPalast Augsburg (dependance of the Pinakothek der Modene, München) entitled Jerry Zeniuk: Elementary Painting. In 2014 there was an exhibition focusing on his large monumental works at Museum Wiesbaden, entitled Not for your Living Room. In 2016 he had an exhibition at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, entitled How to Paint, on which occasion a book with the same title was published with various short texts on painting written by Zeniuk himself.