Deborah Zlotsky
Zlotsky's boldly colored oil paintings on canvas build upon the graphic power of stripes. Stripes structure patterns, suggest cycles, and signify caution. They create order and grace. But in Zlotsky’s paintings, stripes don't always behave. Regular rectangular shapes mutate into dimensional, biomorphic forms. Flat, rigid shapes blur and sometimes become animated with fictional gravity, invented light, and trompe l’oeil passages like strings, shadows, and fleshy parts. These shifts call into question one's perspective.
History manifests itself in her work through drips and smears, which act as records of time and wear. What once appeared to be the background now pops into the foreground; what once felt weightless now presses down on a support structure; what was once hard-edged now softens into almost familiar, life-like forms.
Zlotsky writes: "I’m interested in how history presses against the present and complicates how we understand both the present and the past. Abstraction provides a language of metaphor—as well as a sensory experience—for responding to the way we live on the surface of these continually accumulating pasts."
Deborah Zlotsky earned a B.A. in the History of Art from Yale University and an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from the University of Connecticut. She has exhibited her work in solo and group gallery and museum shows throughout the United States for over twenty years. Zlotsky has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2019) and NYFA (2012 and 2018) and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Bogliasco Foundation, among many others. Her work is held in numerous public and institutional collections, including the Albany Institute of History and Art in New York, the William Benton Museum of Art, CT, the Frances Tang Teaching Museum, NY, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and the Borusan Collection, Istanbul. Zlotsky is Professor of Experimental and Foundational Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. She lives and works in Upstate New York, and is represented by kathryn Markel Fine Arts with two locations in New York City