Forbidden Motion – Surface, Image and Metaphor explores Zucker’s lifelong interest in still life paintings and is reminiscent of Giorgio Morandi’s Nature Morte. Muted color palettes and minimalistic subjects clash with a layered constructivism. Zucker and the Italian master, Morandi, focused on the development of formal qualities of line, color and the material itself. While Morandi painstakingly worked to unlock the puzzles of modern painting looking for the structure and order that underlies the process of representation itself, Zucker is interested in creating the image and the surface simultaneously, investigating their limits.
The exhibition is composed of a new series of works made with Zucker’s pioneering and iconic technique; cotton balls dipped and rolled in a pigmented acrylic called rhoplex, placed onto canvas to approximate brush strokes. The cotton balls physicalize the modular elements of the grid resulting in a highly textured surface reminiscent of antique mosaics in Ravenna. This technique radically transforms the surface of the canvas and challenges its “flatness”. Joe Zucker is one of America’s most innovative artists and, as Roberta Smith of The New York Times wrote; “Zucker occupies an important cusp between modern and postmodern, between Roy Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons”.
