Jerry Zeniuk. How to Paint

ABC-ARTE in Genoa will inaugurate the first solo show in Italy by the German artist Jerry Zeniuk at 18:30 hrs on Thursday 15 December.
Jerry Zeniuk was 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.
For this special occasion, the first significant presence of Zeniuk in Italy, which also marks the start of the official representation of the artist by ABC-ARTE, 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.
Born in 1945 in Bardowick, Germany, to a family of Ukrainian refugees, Jerry Zeniuk moved to Colorado in 1950. He went on to New York, where he studied and made his debut in 1972 with the first solo show at Paley & Lowe. Subsequently Zeniuk moved to Munich, where he lives and where he taught at the Akademie der Bildende Künste from 1992 to 2010. After participating in Documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977, in 1999 he held his first large- scale retrospective in the Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Kunstmuseum Winterthur and the Kunstmuseum Kassel. Since then he has regularly shown his work in public. His memorable one-man shows characterise the activity of two of the most prestigious international galleries, Annemarie Verna in Zurich and Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf and Berlin.
The exhibition in ABC-ARTE is accompanied by a new bilingual monograph published by ABC-ARTE editions, with an essay by the curator Flaminio Gualdoni