Antony Zito “Then and Now”

Mark Miller Gallery

poster for Antony Zito “Then and Now”

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With paintings incorporating collage and found materials created over the course of 20 years in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Antony Zito returns to his former home to discuss the dissolution of culture and the displacement of neighborhoods. In an exhibition anticipated by many long-time New Yorkers, Mark Miller Gallery hosts the first ever large-scale showing of Zito’s work from across two decades in the East Village.

Zito’s early portraits of friends and neighbors scribe a distinct line through the culture that once was the Lower East Side. This was his neighborhood and Zito painted its inhabitants onto the stuff they stepped over on the sidewalk, the displaced relics and detritus of the city. Included in the show, on loan from Jim Jarmusch, is Zito’s portrait of “Lee Marvin” that was hung alongside The White Stripes in “Coffee and Cigarettes”, the film which featured, yet another displaced Lower East Side legend, the late and infamous, Taylor Mead.

In 2008 his non-profit, 4heads, took over the decommissioned military houses on Governors Island to organize a massive annual exhibition. “Gems Among the Ruins”, The New York Times calls the 100 rooms of artwork, sprung up as if from nowhere, in the crumbling, dilapidated landmark buildings of Governors Island Art Fair in 2014.

Zito’s more recent paintings incorporate elements of collage, layering complex vignettes of implication, in stark juxtaposition to the pure clarity of his early portrait works. His collaged painting of “William Burroughs”, weaves overlapping horizons and Bosch-ian symbology, and portrays W.S.B. engaging the darkness, swallowing whole the experience of existing. Other pieces in the show portray distorted historical figures, corrupt deities, angered innocents, grinning junkies, visionary explosions of cosmic energy, and Ellis Island arrivals from distant shores, each feeding, in their own way, into the reality of displacement.

Media

Schedule

from November 13, 2014 to December 04, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-11-13 from 18:00 to 21:00

Artist(s)

Antony Zito

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