July 2007, Philadelphia, PA - Locks Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by New York artist Robert Rahway Zakanitch. The exhibition will bring together ten large-scale paintings from the artist’s Lace Series. This will be Zakanitch’s fourth exhibition with the Locks Gallery and will be accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Arthur C. Danto.
Zakanitch began this series of paintings, which depict home-made lace blown up to a monumental scale, in 1999. After the events on 9/11, the series continued to evolve and became a response by the artist to that tragic day. Zakanitch sees these paintings as “an act of defiance. They are part of the continuous work of ‘mending the firmament’ that is constantly being shredded by hatred, ignorance, and brutality.” To Danto, these paintings, incorporating imagery of good housekeeping, embody “a world in which terror was held at bay, a world of deep peace.”
Zakanitch has been exhibiting his paintings internationally for over four decades. He is one of the founding members of Pattern and Decoration, a group of artists who in the 1970s responsed to the reductive agenda of Minimalism and Conceptual Art by embracing decoration and ornamentation in their work. To this day, Zakanitch still incorporates “the sentimental visuals of [his] childhood environment,” as well as costume jewelry, toy dogs, and floral patterns into his paintings.
Zakanitch has had numerous solo gallery exhibitions, including shows at the Patricia Faure Gallery (Los Angeles), Jason McCoy Gallery (New York), Robert Miller Gallery (New York), Daniel Templon Gallery (Paris), and Bruno Bischofberger Gallery (Zurich). His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at several museums, including the Las Vegas Museum of Art, the University of Iowa Museum of Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. His work is in several public collections, including the Denver Art Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
