John Zurier

John Zurier (born 1956) is an abstract painter born in Santa Monica, CA, known for his minimal, near-monochrome paintings. His work has shown across the American West as well as in Europe and Japan. He has worked in Reykjavik, Iceland and Berkeley, Ca.
Education.
John Zurier received a BA degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley in 1979 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from The University of California at Berkeley in 1983.
Career and exhibition.
John Zurier's work has been shown in galleries and museums since 1980. Zurier was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York City, the 2008 Gwangju Biennale in Gwangju, South Korea. and the 2012 São Paulo Biennial in São Paulo, Brazil. Zurier is represented by "Anglim Gilbert Gallery" in San Francisco, "Peter Blum Gallery" in New York City and by "Galerie Nordenhake" in Stockholm, Sweden and Berlin, Germany. Zurier lives and works in Berkeley, California.
Style and technique.
Zurier paints abstract, near-monochrome paintings whose colors range from muted tones to vibrant hues. Zurier's abstract paintings are informed by abstract expressionism, Post-War French painting, and Japanese aesthetics. His main interest is in simplicity, surface modulation, and color, as those are tied to people's experience of time. Zurier's reductive paintings show his dedication to color, the material fact of painting, and the history of painting. His soft-hued abstract paintings play at crossing the line into representation with the sensation of nature, the silence of luminous weather, and the human touch. Capturing qualities of light and weather effects, Zurier employs a range of brushstrokes and surface treatments, varying from revealing the texture of the canvas or obscuring it with layers of thick impasto. Zurier's work has been described as transcending the gestural and material to evoke the emotional. While minimal, Zurier's practice is not minimalist, but rather composed of quiet works that focus on the structure and possibilities of a brushstroke. “I think the Japanese painter Ike No Taiga [1723–1776] was right,” Zurier has said, “the most difficult thing to achieve in painting is creating a space where absolutely nothing has been painted.”