John Zurier @ Peter Blum Gallery, NYC - "Pink Dust" Exhibition

John Zurier: Pink Dust

Peter Blum Gallery, New York

September 2 – November 1, 2025

Peter Blum Gallery presents Pink Dust, an exhibition of new works by Berkeley and Reykjavík -based artist, JOHN ZURIER. This marks the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery.

John Zurier's exhibition Pink Dust features a body of work created over the past two years predominantly in Iceland. This group of smaller paintings and one large painting emerged from his time at a farmhouse at the base of a mountain with views of fields, the sea, and a glacier in the distance, deeply influencing his artistic practice. The works revisit and expand upon the abstract formal language Zurier developed after his initial visit to Iceland in 2002.

The exhibition title and the largest painting’s title, A History of Pink Dust, are taken from Ron Padgett's book of poems entitled, Pink Dust. They symbolize the tangible residue of the creative process—the erasures, revisions, and diligent effort in both poetry and painting. It speaks to accumulation and condensation, highlighting the complexity and time required to achieve simplicity.

Many of these paintings were created at a farm known for its persistent winds. John Zurier embraces this constant presence, viewing it as a pervasive form of breathing that moves through everything. He aims to cultivate stillness within this dynamic environment, striving for what he calls a silent, moving stillness that moves through the paintings themselves. Over the last two years, his focus has been on achieving greater density in the paintings, imbuing the atmosphere with more weight and making the light feel more substantial.

John Zurier's artistic exploration has led him deeper into the monochrome, which he perceives as a realm of infinite possibility. As color narrows—grays that hold traces of blue or green, whites that carry the memory of yellow— every delicate shift is amplified, encouraging a different mode of perception. Working with colors in lower registers and contrasts demands heightened attention. The paintings encourage viewers to slow down and engage with them over time, resisting quick interpretations and asserting their own temporal rhythms.

While some paintings possess the fluid immediacy of open skies, many surfaces are more distressed and worked. John Zurier employs techniques of scraping, wiping, building up, and tearing down, allowing the paint to accumulate the history of these actions. This creates a quality akin to weathering, mirroring how the Icelandic landscape bears the marks of time. Each surface functions as a field that can be simultaneously disrupted and continued, with marks creating their own logic and rhythm—what Zurier likens to the painting's breathing.

What John Zurier seeks is atmosphere as material itself. The unique, quiet diffusion of Iceland's air inspires him to have the paintings contain this quality. The slow light in Iceland fosters patience, building gradually and shifting imperceptibly with sudden shifts. Working in this light, Zurier has learned to trust the process over deliberate decisions, with paintings emerging from gradual layering.

These recent paintings demand more time to complete due to their layered complexity, requiring periods of dormancy between sessions, and thus holding a temporal density that reflects the desired atmospheric density within the work. Much like air holds moisture or light slows through water, these paintings embody a greater accumulation of time.

This working method has transformed Zurier's perception. His eye has adapted to subtlety, discerning micro-variations within apparent sameness. Stillness, for John Zurier, is not the absence of movement, but movement so concentrated it becomes its own form of rest. In these paintings, he strives to make this paradox visible—surfaces that vibrate with accumulated energy, yet offer profound quiet to those who spend time with them.

JOHN ZURIER (b. 1956, Santa Monica, CA) lives and works in Berkeley, CA and Reykjavík, Iceland. He earned an MFA at the University of California, Berkeley (1984). Instititutional exhibitions include Currier Museum, Manchester, NH (forthcoming 2026); Scheider Art Museum, Ashland, OR (forthcoming 2025); High Museum, Atlanta, GA (2025); The National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík (2023); Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (2023, 2018, 2014); Stavanger Art Museum, Stavanger, Norway (2023); Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden (2021); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2017); New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM (2016); Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME (2015). He has exhibited at the 30th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2012); California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, CA (2010); 7th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2008); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, England (2003); and the Whitney Biennial, NY (2002). He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2010).

PETER BLUM GALLERY

176 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013

www.peterblumgallery.com

Shifting Horizons @ Peter Blum Gallery, NYC - An exhibition of paintings featuring landscapes by Nancy Diamond, Alex Katz, Eleanor Ray, Nicole Wittenberg, Robert Zandvliet

Shifting Horizons

Nancy Diamond, Alex Katz, Eleanor Ray, Nicole Wittenberg, Robert Zandvliet

Peter Blum Gallery, New York

June 5 – July 25, 2025

Peter Blum Gallery presents Shifting Horizons, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper featuring landscapes by Nancy Diamond, Alex Katz, Eleanor Ray, Nicole Wittenberg, and Robert Zandvliet. 

Shifting Horizons assembles five contemporary artists whose intimately scaled landscapes reflect a shared sensitivity to the nuances of place, perception, and memory. Working at a modest size in these works, Diamond, Katz, Ray, Wittenberg, and Zandvliet approach the natural world not as a fixed subject but as a space for exploration—where observation and emotion converge. These works transcend straightforward representation, instead offering distilled moments that evoke atmosphere, light, and spatial rhythm. Whether rooted in direct experience or shaped by recollection, the landscapes presented here invite a slower way of seeing.

Nancy Diamond’s recent works on paper explore the interplay between natural observation and imaginative transformation. Utilizing watercolor and gouache, she creates layered compositions of clouded skies, often inspired by her time in the Catskills. These images shift between the recognizable and the abstract, reflecting a space between recording and reimagining. Her attention to form and subtle variation invites viewers into a quiet terrain that considers both detail and broader view, where the natural world is shaped by personal perspective. Within this space, a subtle bodily presence emerges, connecting internal and external, inviting contemplation on how perception and memory mediate experience. Diamond’s palette suggests changing weather, fading light, and quiet transitions—moments that feel both observed and remembered. Diamond received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and she received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation. Select recent exhibitions include FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2024); Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY (2024); and KARMA, Thomaston, ME (2024).

Alex Katz’s small-scale landscape paintings on board reveal a more immediate and spontaneous side of his iconic practice of larger scale flattened forms. Often painted en plein air or quickly from memory, they emphasize light, seasonal shifts, and spatial rhythm. The landscapes on board are concise yet expansive, balancing on the cusp of abstraction and representation. In these works, Katz revisits familiar locations—Maine woods, waterlines, and fields—with a sense of closeness, reinforcing his enduring fascination with perception, time, and the American landscape. Katz studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Cooper Union, and he received the National Medal of Arts and Lifetime Achievement Award, National Academy Museum. Select recent solo exhibitions include The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2024); The Albertina, Vienna, Austria (2023); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2022-23).

Eleanor Ray’s intimately scaled landscape paintings distill complex spatial and emotional experiences into panels, often no larger than a notebook page. Working primarily in oil on panel, she captures the essence of places—ranging from the American West to the Caribbean—through a synthesis of memory, observation, and abstraction. Her compositions are informed by drawings, photographs, and recollections, allowing her to reconstruct scenes with a focus on light, atmosphere, and architectural framing. This approach results in works that are both specific and universal, inviting viewers into a contemplative space that transcends the depicted locale. Ray’s restrained palette and subtle brushwork evoke a sense of quietude and introspection, demonstrating how modestly scaled works can convey resonance. Ray received an MFA from the New York Studio School and received awards from The Edward F. Albee Foundation and NYFA Fellowship in Painting. Select recent exhibitions include Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY (2024); Venus Over Manhattan, New York, NY (2022); and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022).

Nicole Wittenberg’s works are expressively rich. Beyond rendering naturalistic topography or scenery, living entities emerge in her images as through sensation or perception: a torrent of water, the twist of a leaf, the glare of afternoon light on the bark of a tree, all suggestive of fleeting moments and a subjective view. In a textural play of color and movement, they convey her affective relationship to the natural world, as well as nature’s evanescent traits. While Wittenberg captures the physical reality of Maine’s coastal forests, wetlands, and meadows, she more closely works with light, with the transit of the sun through the sky, as well as her own positioning within the dense and verdant landscape. Wittenberg received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ John Koch Award. Select recent solo exhibitions include Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME (2025); Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME (2025); and Maison la Roche, Paris, France (2025).

Robert Zandvliet’s works on paper—each horizontal and measuring 9 x 12 inches—demonstrate an intuitive and meditative engagement with landscape and mark-making. Using egg tempera, oil, or a combination, Zandvliet treats each paper surface as a space for distilled experimentation, balancing gesture, color, and form. They operate like visual thoughts: rhythmic, atmospheric, and charged with a sense of immediacy. Despite their uniform size, the works vary in tone, yet all reflect his ongoing investigation into the essence of painting itself. Zandvliet’s process reveals a careful calibration between control and spontaneity, echoing the structure of historical Dutch landscape painting while pushing toward abstraction. Robert Zandvliet received an MFA from De Ateliers, Amsterdam, Netherlands and received a Prix de Rome and the Wolvekamp Prize. Select recent exhibitions include Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands (2022); Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Solothurn, Switzerland (2022); and Dordrechts Museum, Dordrechts, Netherlands (2020, 2019).

PETER BLUM GALLERY

176 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013

www.peterblumgallery.com 

Rebecca Ward @ Peter Blum Gallery, NYC - "vector specter" Exhibition

Rebecca Ward

vector specter

Peter Blum Gallery, New York

Through May 31, 2025

Peter Blum Gallery presents vector specter, an exhibition of new works by Brooklyn-based artist, Rebecca Ward. 

Rebecca Ward's practice merges painting, sculpture, and craft by physically deconstructing and reassembling canvases to create geometrically grounded works. By exposing the multidimensional nature of painting and its constituent parts, Ward creates a spatial play of harmonious forms and color interactions that explore the relationship between the mathematical and the natural world.

In the current exhibition, Rebecca Ward delves into the complex interplay between transparency and the spectral presence of the abstract. Through a manipulation of reassembled materials and viscous gradients, the artist explores spectrums—both literal and metaphorical—where shadow and form transcend their physical boundaries. The work invites viewers to contemplate the delicate nature of perception, blurring the lines between the tangible and the ethereal. Ghostly silhouettes, fragmented and elusive, emerge from the translucency of unwoven canvas, embodying the shifting forms that shape understanding of reality.

Each of the ten works in the exhibition incorporate both hard-edged and curving forms that emerge from rectangular canvas planes, with varying scales, tonalities, and configurations. The shapes originate as digital drawings within a mathematical space—a vector that can be infinitely large or small—before being enclosed within the confines of stretcher bars. This initial step of creating sketches involves layering dissected forms and diverse shades that persist in the final handcrafted, sculptural objects.

The titles add layers of associations as in Ward’s two largest works to date, soft landing and sea creature, that required a highly physical approach in construction and washes of color. In hunger and hunger II, geometric sections of canvas are hand-dyed and painted in a spectrum of pinks and maroons, evoking wider associations of tone. A signature of Ward’s practice over the past decade has included taking fabric apart by removing the weft to create a new and transparent image. Particularly prevalent in open secret, yet present in each of the works, is unraveled canvas that both exposes and obscures the underlying stretcher bars.

The woven canvas can be understood as a physical representation of a mathematical grid, where the warp and weft create a regular pattern of squares and rectangles, a visual reflection of geometric order. As a queer identified person, Rebecca Ward combines curving lines and axis to demonstrate that masculinity and femininity are not fixed, binary concepts, but are dynamic, evolving, and context dependent. In this way, the grid becomes a representation of the slippage between forms that can be viewed as bodies, vessels, graphs, or purely geometric outlines. Through these methods, Rebecca Ward communicates the presence of what shapes cannot be fully grasped, offering a meditation on the nature of being, absence, and spaces in between.

Rebecca Ward (b. 1984, Waco, TX) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She earned a BA at the University of Texas, Austin, TX (2006) and an MFA at the School of the Visual Arts, New York, NY (2012). Institutional exhibitions include Rebecca Ward: distance to venus, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM (2022); Fresh Faces from the Rachofsky Collection, Site 131, Dallas, TX (2021); Over & Over, Columbia College, Chicago, IL (2018); Rebecca Ward, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2017); Eastwing Biennial: Artificial Realities, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK (2016); Making & Unmaking, Camden Art Centre, London, UK (2016); The Tim Sayer Bequest, The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom (2016); Linear Abstraction, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA (2015); Rebecca Ward: indulgences, Exchiesetta, Polignano a Mare, Italy (2015). Residencies include Shandaken: Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY (2016) and Atelier Alighiero Boetti, Todi, Italy (2013).

PETER BLUM GALLERY

176 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013

www.peterblumgallery.com

Rebecca Ward: vector specter @ Peter Blum Gallery, New York, April 5 – May 31, 2025

David Rabinowitch @ Peter Blum Gallery, NYC - " Works from 1962 – 2018" Exhibition

David Rabinowitch 

Works from 1962 – 2018 

Peter Blum Gallery, New York 

September 3 – November 2, 2024

Peter Blum Gallery presents an exhibition of sculptures and works on paper by DAVID RABINOWITCH entitled, Works from 1962 – 2018. This memorial survey exhibition of selected bodies of work spans six decades of Rabinowitch’s artistic output. It is the eighth solo exhibition of the artist’s work with the gallery; his first being the inaugural exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery in 1993. 

For over six decades, David Rabinowitch employed a rigorous empiricism through numerous serial investigations into the principals of perception. His cycles from the early 1960s through the 2010s, comprised primarily of metal sculptures and works on paper, constitute a fundamental project probing the modes of observation. He practiced a highly independent and philosophical approach grounded in an analysis of the basic conditions, properties, and relations that mark out experience of the physical world, aiming to facilitate a synthesis of the act of seeing with that of recognizing and knowing.

In 1962 at the age of 19 in Toronto, David Rabinowitch developed a series of textured and colored woodblock monotypes. Although independent works, the emblematic shapes seem to anticipate future sculptures. The next year he created his first horizontal metal sculptures with his drawing studies visualizing the artist’s process and vantage points for the three-dimensional works, as in the expressive drawings for 1964’s Fluid Sheets. Begun in 1967, the Phantom Group of floor-based elliptical sculptures with multiple straight “folds” are accompanied by drawings that lend an immediate and energetic movement in two dimensions through rubbed oil crayon, pencil, charcoal, and paint on paper.

In 1968 – 69, David Rabinowitch began his signature hot rolled steel sculptures with the Mass Works series – three examples of which are included in the exhibition. This group investigates the properties of perceived mass through weight, density, and viscosity. The solid and compact works present a sense of inertness and immovability; the viewer’s own mobility around them highlights the viewer’s physical position and viewpoint as being integral to overall perception. In Plane of 3 Masses, I, the segmented elliptical form further serves to emphasize its mass, but now with a centralized sense of gravity. Suggesting possibilities of rearrangement and highlighting an internal structure, Raised Construction of (9) Opposed Members, presents masses in a stage of being lifted or lowered. Romanesque Abutment I, emphasizes perceived external pressure that mass can exert through the sculpture’s appearance of supporting a section of wall; its “notches” draw attention to the internal distribution of mass.

From 1969 through the mid-1970s, David Rabinowitch created a series of stand-alone ink and graphite works on paper entitled, Construction of Vision. These employed a systematic approach in the medium of two-dimensional art through a refined geometric language of ellipses, straight lines, and circles that are rendered precisely. Focusing the viewer’s attention on the nature of observation itself, Rabinowitch separates distinct visual elements. These do not literally “combine” in the work into an overall composition, but rather they come together in the “constructive” act of the viewer’s perception by facilitating readings of relations, comparisons, and unifying elements. Both complementing and contrasting with this series during the same period, Rabinowitch simultaneously concerned himself with the subject of the tree, and more generally with order found in nature, that he rendered in expressive and energetic drawing studies.

Over the subsequent decades, David Rabinowitch would continue his investigative practice through a focus on works on paper. By 2008, the Birth of Romanticism Drawings would now favor a high diversity of perceived forms and dense layers through rapid sketching, quick traces of crayon and pencil, and highly built-up surfaces. In his subsequent series, Untitled: For Lucretius/Lucretia, the compositions take shape as shifting visual combinations of moving parts creating a rapid and allover sense of observation with an emphasis on the natural form of the seashell.

Romanesque architecture was of consistent interest throughout David Rabinowitch’s life, and in 2012 he began the series Périgord Construction of Vision using ecclesiastical architecture of the Périgord region in France as a conceptual framework. Creating a unique visual language, the works on paper are rich in diverse structural complexities as well as materials including beeswax and collage. They propose a fluctuating relationship between abstraction, architecture, and perception of the physical world, a thread throughout Rabinowitch’s body of work that offers a space to question and challenge visual certainties.

 

DAVID RABINOWITCH was born in Toronto, ON in 1943 and passed away in 2022. Solo institutional exhibitions include Museum Wiesbaden, Germany (2017); Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Germany (2016); Haus der Kunst St. Josef, Solothurn, Switzerland (2012); The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX (2008); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON (2004); Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland (2004); Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, QC (2003); Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (1996); Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (1993); among others. Institutional collections include: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland;  Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Germany; MIT Museum, Cambridge, MA; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, QC; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany; Saint Louis Art Museum, MO; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; among others.

PETER BLUM GALLERY

176 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013

www.peterblumgallery.com

Erik Lindman @ Peter Blum Gallery, NYC - "Helian" Exhibition

Erik Lindman: Helian

Peter Blum Gallery, New York

November 17, 2023 - January 20, 2024

Peter Blum Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by Erik Lindman entitled Helian at 176 Grand Street, New York. This is Erik Lindman’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, and is the first time his paintings, sculptures, and works on paper are presented together.

Erik Lindman's artistic practice is defined by his innovative use of found materials such as shards of steel or canvas webbing as central elements in his paintings, allowing the built-up surface to direct the development of the work. The central forms—often avian or humanoid in appearance—emerge from monochromatic fields, creating a dynamic interplay between figure and ground. Never simply placed onto the canvas, these forms are synergistically integrated into the composition, with each shape and contour carefully considered while the thick layers of paint, bodied with shredded rubber and ground glass, add texture and depth to the painting’s topographical surface.

In addition to his paintings, Erik Lindman explores his fascination with materials and form through sculpture and work on paper. His sculptures investigate a sequential series of viewpoints, each dissimilar and separate from the next, providing a three-dimensional counterpart to the layered surfaces of his paintings. Similarly, his works on paper—often drawings of negative space between things that he encounters such as clouds or leaves—serve as an extension of his painting practice where he experiments with light and composition in a more improvisatory manner. In total, Erik Lindman’s open-ended oeuvre invites viewers to both question and reaffirm the distinct possibilities of abstraction for his own generation.

ERIK LINDMAN (b. 1985, New York) lives and works in New York. He earned his BA from Columbia University in 2007 and received a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship in 2006. Lindman was honored at the Hirshhorn Museum’s Artist x Artist Gala in 2019. He has also received The Louis Sudler Prize for Excellence in the Arts from Columbia University in 2007, as well as an Ellen B. Stoeckel Fellowship for Yale Norfolk School of Art in 2006. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Kunsthalle FriArt Fribourg in Freiburg, Switzerland, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, White Columns in New York, le 109 in Nice, France, Kaviar Factory in Henningsvær, Norway, and Foundation Hippocrène in Paris among others.

PETER BLUM GALLERY

176 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013

www.peterblumgallery.com

Helmut Federle, Peter Blum Gallery, New York - Works on Paper from 1969 to 2001

Helmut Federle 

Works on Paper from 1969 to 2001 

Peter Blum Gallery, New York

May 3 - July 12, 2003

Peter Blum presents the exhibition HELMUT FEDERLE: Works on Paper from 1969 to 2001 at the Peter Blum Gallery, 99 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10012.

The exhibition comprises 200 drawings executed in pencil, gouache, ink, crayon and oil and ranging from sketches and studies to finished works. It is the first time that such an important and extensive group of works on paper by Helmut Federle has been shown anywhere.

The range of the drawings traces Helmut Federle’s development from his early abstract studies of mountain ranges, which perhaps already show a tendency towards geometrical reduction, to a later incorporation of motifs which bring together characters of the Far East and symbolic shapes.

Helmut Federle has always traveled extensively among the remains of ancient cultures, in particular the Far East, but also South and North America. In 1985 Federle traveled to China and Tibet. Many travels followed including Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. The work of that period can be seen to reflect latent formal links to art of these cultures.

In 1985 Helmut Federle formulated and published a fundamental text on his theory of drawing called: “On Mass and Expansion in Drawing”.

From 1992 Helmut Federle spent time in Galisteo, New Mexico where he met regularly with the artist Agnes Martin, a stated influence on his work. At that time Federle was exposed to the ancient Mimbres culture of the Southwest whose ceramic works gave title to two of the drawings in this exhibition and in general has had a significant influence on his work.

From this exhibition, as well as statements from the artist, it is clear that the works on paper are not only an important adjunct to Helmut Federle’s paintings, but also an integral part of his overall work.

Born in 1944 in Switzerland, HELMUT FEDERLE now lives and works in Vienna, Austria. A partial description of Federle’s major exhibitions follows. In 1985 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Basel exhibited an extensive survey of the paintings and drawings of Federle. In 1986 The Los Angeles County Museum of Art included Federle in its thematic review exhibition entitled The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985. In 1989 Federle had his first major individual exhibition in France at the Musée de Grenoble. This was followed in 1992 by an individual exhibit at the Kunsthalle Zürich of large paintings which went on tour to the Moderna Museet, Stockholm and the Museum Fridericianum, Kassel. In 1995 the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris exhibited his “Corner Field Paintings” for the first time on a larger scale. In 1996 there followed a retrospective (paintings from 1977 – 1995) at the Kunstmuseum, Bonn. In 1997 Helmut Federle’s work represented the official Swiss contribution to the 1997 Venice Biennial, and in 1999–2000, a major exhibition followed at the Kunsthaus, Bregenz.

PETER BLUM GALLERY

99 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10012

www.peterblumgallery.com