Zachary Wollard

Zachary Wollard likes to include abrupt shifts in scale, style, surface, pattern and setting within individual paintings. Instrumental to the artist’s practice is rigorous art historical research that works in tandem with a chosen theme to a body of work. The paintings contain elements of landscape, still life, figuration, abstraction, and ornamentation, resisting a single genre for a more open-ended approach formally. He is drawn to geographical and painterly locations where juxtapositions of contexts, settings, styles and symbols challenge us towards new and more complex syncretic possibilities. The paint handling is just as likely to push forward the narrative as it is to withdraw from it.

“The paintings "Sonic Ghost" and "Squat" (on view in this exhibition) are based on memories I have from my childhood in Kansas City. My friends and I would take over these abandoned buildings and throw these impromptu parties. There was a sense of wild abandon to these gatherings that was transcendental. We were all very young and desperate to escape the suffocating structures of family and school. People would be out of their heads, laughing, crying, dancing, making out. Music was central to these events. The friendships I formed during this period had a kind of openness, depth and abandon unlike anything I had experienced up to that point. I think of these paintings as memorials to these "squatting" parties. I wanted them to be compositionally dense. Layers of light and color pour through these spaces in unexpected ways--expressing more of a sense of the chaos of these gatherings and the emotional feeling I have for this time.” Zachary Wollard

Zachary Wollard was born in 1974 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Munich, and Madrid.