Joseph Zito “The First Thirty Years, 1985 – 2015”

Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.

poster for Joseph Zito “The First Thirty Years, 1985 – 2015”

This event has ended.

Lennon, Weinberg first showed Joseph Zito’s work in a three-artist exhibition of
sculpture in 1993. Housed in our first gallery venue at 580 Broadway in Soho, we
presented two works including Untitled (For C.W.), which we are pleased to include in
this exhibition, a selective survey of thirty years of Zito’s work.

The show will also include First Cut, from 1985, the sculpture that Zito describes as the
first work in which he recognized that he had found a way past the influence of older
artists that lingered in his work following his graduation from the School of Visual
Arts. First Cut was key to a body of work involving an exploration of positive and
negative spaces embedded in the wall that were well-received when exhibited in the
late 1980s at Damon Brandt and Rosa Esman Gallery.

“On the surface the work appears to be Minimalist/Conceptual but I see it more in the
vein of pure Expressionism. The work is rooted in the primal emotions and not the
intellect; more Soutine than Newman.”

The quote from Zito aptly describes an important aspect of his evolution from a maker
of relatively formal explorations of process and material to one who applied that
exploration to increasingly self-referential content. This transition became apparent
during his solo exhibition in 1997 at our second gallery location at 560 Broadway in
which we first showed the strangely affecting sculpture titled Mammy. Three painted
bronze casts of a once-considered-appropriate cookie jar were suspended from the hand
of an also now inappropriate lawn jockey, that yield a lovely bell-tone when struck with
a wooden mallet.

His four exhibitions at our present gallery location in Chelsea have taken on themes of
fear, war, death, grief, salvation and hope, culminating in the installation Inversion that
we showed here two years ago. The survey exhibition will include selections from each
of these series along with several new works from 2014. One final work, The Red
Chair, might not have been conceived and executed without the exhibition requiring of
Zito a kind of stepping back and reviewing the path he has travelled as an artist during
the past three decades. He took his studio chair, an old upholstered armchair that had
been a fixture of every one of his Brooklyn studios, and cast it in hydrostone,
destroying the actual chair in the process. In his essay for a book published at the
occasion of the exhibition, Damon Brandt wrote:
“As he made plans for the upcoming survey of thirty years of work at Lennon,
Weinberg, the red chair found itself in the klieg light of retrospective preoccupation, in
his mind the ultimate autobiographical talisman and a physical embodiment of the
continuity between his past, present and future.”

The 136-page book gives a more comprehensive overview of Zito’s sculptures and
works on paper than is possible in a single gallery exhibition. It has been published in a
signed and numbered limited editio

Media

Schedule

from June 11, 2015 to September 26, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-06-11 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Joseph Zito

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