Opening Reception: Saturday April 29th | 4pm–7pm 

“In representing wind, besides the bending of boughs and the reversing of their leaves towards the quarter whence the wind comes, you should also represent them amid clouds of fine dust mingled with the troubled air.” Leonardo Da Vinci Anglim Gilbert Gallery is pleased to present Dust and Troubled Air, an exhibition of new paintings by the highly-regarded Bay Area painter John Zurier. Zurier's method is contemplative, with every aspect of the materials and process selected for their effect. He considers both the physical presence of the object being created as well as the nature of the image experienced. All elements are important: the cloth support, its weave and weight (whether canvas or linen) and how it is mounted on its wood support; the support frame itself, its size, proportion and profile; and the desired medium to carry his pigments, whether oil, glue-size tempera (distemper) or, even at times, watercolor; and the technique of applying the pigment. A balance of intuition and reasoning guides his composition.

Reflecting on his recent work, the artist cites The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and offers insight into his recent practice and imagery that combines observation of nature with attention to modernist conventions of formal abstraction. In Zurier’s words: “The wind cannot be seen. We only see the things set in motion and carried along by it. Da Vinci’s formula holds two keys to painting’s enigma: there are things in painting that can only be seen indirectly, and, as Jean Louis Schefer has suggested, the wind, the cause generating the effect, is in the material of painting itself.”

From a recent review in Stavanger Aftenblad, the Norwegian critic Trond Borgen wrote: "I see Zurier's painting as an extension of modernism's quest for the purity of the medium, yet completely without the heroic overtones, as is so typical of some American Abstract Expressionism. Zurier rather gives us an anti-heroic painting, where the apparent weakness and lack of power of the image are inverted to become its strength. What strikes me is the physical sensuality of these paintings, where they fill the exhibition with a pure sensory experience."

Zurier’s 11th solo exhibition, Dust and Troubled Air celebrates over 30 years of representation by the gallery.

The artist lives and works in Berkeley, California where he studied (BA & MFA from UC Berkeley) with Joan Brown and Elmer Bischoff. In 2014 the Berkeley Art Museum organized a solo exhibition, as part of its historically significant Matrix program. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010, Zurier participated in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the 2008 Gwangju Biennial, the 2010 California Biennial (Orange County Museum of Art) and the 2012 Sao Paulo Biennial.