The Central Libraries > Mid-Manhattan Library > Art > Artist Wall on Third

John Zinsser

27 June – 31 July 2008
“Art in the Windows”
On view day and night

Mid-Manhattan Library
The Art Collection
40th Street @ 5th Avenue
New York, NY 10016
212-340-0871
Mon-Wed 9-9, Thu-Sat 10-6, Sun 1-5
Contact: Arezoo Moseni

The Art Collection at Mid-Manhattan Library is pleased to present High Double, a painting by the well-known New York painter John Zinsser. He created the painting specifically for “Art in the Windows” exhibition series. Zinsser will present a slide lecture, The Fate of Painting on Wednesday July 2nd at Mid-Manhattan Library at 6:30 p.m. The exhibition series “Art in the Windows” is curated by Arezoo Moseni.

The Fate of Painting

Contemporary art and its audience are moving into ever new and challenging territory. Yet painting, as a historically-established medium, always remains central to the dialogue. John Zinsser will provide a larger art historical context to frame the current paradigm shift. He argues that we have entered a time of increased “lexical crisis” as artistic practices collide freely with viewer responses. Modernism and its attendant painting developments—cubism, expressionism, geometric abstraction, pop and minimalism—have launched a hybrid visual genealogy. And its recombinant qualities have only just begun to be explored. The lecture will move forward from the European model of Picasso and Mondrian to the American response of Pollock and Warhol. Now, we see a 21st Century aesthetic forming from the likes of painters Luc Tuymans, Karen Kilimnik, Anselm Reyle and Wade Guyton. What marks this movement? And where will it take us?

John Zinsser

(b. New York, 1961) lectures on art history at the New School University. An abstract painter, he has been showing regularly in the United States and Europe since the late 1980s, and his work is held in major public and corporate collections. His recent show at James Graham & Sons was reviewed in The New York Sun and the Brooklyn Rail. Galerie S65 in Belgium has represented his work since 1993. He has worked broadly in the art field as a writer, editor and public speaker. He co-founded Journal of Contemporary Art in 1988 and has written extensively about contemporary painting.