Larissa Goldston Gallery is pleased to present Empty Collisions, the gallery's first solo exhibition of paintings by Zachary Wollard. The exhibition will be on view from Friday, February 19 through Saturday, March 27, 2010. There will be an opening reception for the artist on Friday, February 19 from 6 to 8 pm.
The exhibition consists of two series of paintings—landscapes and interiors—which depict fractured representations of complex fictive realms. The paintings on view explore syncretic, contemplative, dream-like scenes, inspired by imagery culled from tours of both India and Northern Europe over the past several years. Wollard cites work from folk art museums in Karnataka and Delhi, the Dr. Guislain museum as well as Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece as influential.
The interiors, which Wollard refers to as “Psychic Architecture,” are the result of his fascination with 19th century glass structures and the conflation of the self-evident boundaries of interior and exterior space. Drawing parallels between these artificial spaces and the human mind, Wollard explores open-ended territory where imaginary histories and painterly inclinations merge.
In contrast, the landscapes are imagined geographies in which diverse personal and historical iconographies interact and interrupt narrative flow. They examine the simultaneity of multiple realities as they collude and collide in nature, offering whimsical, strange and otherworldly connections. The figures appear to interact with a kind of detached intimacy, empty of any pre-determined logical causality, allowing uncommon relationships to unfold openly.
These engaging and amusingly disjunctive narratives are largely the result of their construction. Wollard works directly on canvas, sometimes with one or two crude compositional sketches as a preliminary guide. Initial motivations propel the work through a process of exploration and experimentation in which characters and settings are added and deleted. This slow compositional strategy generates multi-faceted, meditative pictures that reject a one-idea, one-painting paradigm.
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. His exhibitions have been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, Flash Artand other international publications.
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