Deborah Zlotsky's bold, new paintings build upon the graphic power of stripes. In the paintings, stripes don't always behave. Regular rectangular shapes mutate into dimensional, biomorphic forms. Flat, rigid forms blur and become animated with fictional gravity, invented light, and trompe l’oeil passages. 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. Zlotsky says, "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."
