"Symbolic Gesture Structure" by Zahar Vaks

Artist Statement

My paintings are material narratives made alive through my multi-sensory approach to creation. Smell and touch are just as important to me as seeing the work. I pair traditional art materials, such as oil, balsam tree sap, and pigments, with ingredients used in cooking, such as beet powder and turmeric. I’m thinking about sensory connections too: playing the violin, moving my body, finding rhymes in English and Russian, and what happens when I manipulate recorded moving images and sounds. For example, the gestures in my painting echo the use of vibrato when I play the violin. And as with dancing, my paintings contain multiple speeds. A quick bold gesture can dissolve into a slow and subtle remnant. The presence and absence of structure plays a significant role when I am constructing forms and conjuring imagery.

Bio

Zahar Vaks is from Tashkent, Uzbekistan and lives in New York City. He has had exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Columbus, Las Vegas, Houston, Vienna, on the island of Svalbard in Norway, and, most recently, in Beijing , China. Zahar participated in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency; the Galveston Artist Residency; and will be participating in the Artists in Residence (AIR) program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2021. He is a member of Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG), an artist-run curatorial collective and exhibition space in Gowanus, Brooklyn. He holds a BFA from Tyler School of Art, and his MFA from The Ohio State