Anthe Zacharias:
Paintings, 1958–1966: Online

Kasmin presents a selection of paintings by Anthe Zacharias (b. 1934, Albania) viewable online and by appointment at 514 West 28th Street. Featuring seven paintings executed between 1958 and 1966, the presentation highlights Zacharias’s arrival at her celebrated exploration of color and gestural forms in large-scale compositions that evolve from her early Abstract Expressionist painting style. Realized at a pivotal juncture in Zacharias’s more than 60-year practice, the works foreground the artist’s synthesis of painting elements of line, color, light and movement that were rooted in observations from nature. 

Zacharias’s paintings present a downpour of moving color on canvas, bearing resemblance to the passage of circular formations in an expansive palette. Cloud-like shapes float from edge to edge of the artist’s compositions, creating an evocation of nature recently applauded by critic Donald Kuspit in Artforum. With loose, open brushwork, Zacharias spreads her paint across the surface to seamlessly blend her colors together, to the effect that it becomes nearly impossible to decipher where one color stops and another begins. Her forms are often complemented by the application of translucent glazes that emphasize the luminous quality of the painted surface.

After a number of critically-acclaimed New York exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s, much of Zacharias’s work remains rarely seen; though she never stopped painting, the artist took a hiatus from exhibiting after 1974 and only reintroduced her work to public view 40 years later. She arrived at her most recognizable style in the early 1960s, while working and exhibiting in New York. Her studio in an old sea captain’s residence at 66 Pearl Street, steps away from the Coenties Slip studios of Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin and others, offered Zacharias the space and freedom to experiment with her compositions. At an increasingly large scale, she developed a distinctive visual language in which her colors and forms breathe across the canvas, and she would gain recognition for participating in New York group exhibitions alongside artists Mark di Suvero, Louise Bourgeois, and others.

Following her first solo exhibition in 1966, held at Great Jones Gallery in Manhattan, Zacharias garnered praise for radiating vitality in her affective works executed at a grand scale. Critic Cindy Nemser admired Zacharias’s synthesis of the Abstract Expressionist surface patterns of Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky with the School of Paris’s buoyancy and vibrant palette.