The art of Robert Zakanitch is on view in Robert Zakanitch: Garden of Ornament at the Hudson River Museum from June 3 to September 17, 2017. The exhibition draws from an array of Zakanitch’s works that explore depictions of floral beauty in this artist’s 50-year career in which he explored color, line, and form. Zakanitch’s art has been seen around the world in solo and group exhibitions, and is in the collections of major museums in the United States and Europe.

Zakanitch, who began painting in the 1960s, first as an Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist, became, only a decade later, the driving force for a small but dedicated group of Pattern & Decoration (P&D) artists. Inspired by the handiwork with which women had always decorated their homes, these artists believed that the graceful line of ornamentation was art, an art stemming from our domestic environments. Zakanitch relished curving line and the lush color of all things animate and inanimate, and they became part of his passage to represent the social world.

In the mid-70s, Zakanitch taught at the University of California, San Diego, and there met artists exploring the patterns of Asian and Middle Eastern textiles. New York Times critic Holland Cotter reviewing the Hudson River Museum’s 2007 exhibition, Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975-1985, commented on the worldview of the Pattern & Decoration artists. "They looked at Roman and Byzantine mosaics in Italy, Islamic tiles in Spain and North Africa. They went to Turkey for flower-covered embroideries, to Iran and India for carpets and miniatures, and to Manhattan’s Lower East Side for knockoffs of these. Then they took everything back to their studios and made a new art from it.” With broad compass, Zakanitch chooses his materials—silkscreen, canvas, paper, watercolors, oil, gold leaf—and the images he creates are as varied as the materials on which he presents them. This is evident in the whirling circles of a snail’s shell (In Quest of the Holy Snail, 2010), the fragile lines of a vine (Talisman, 2011-12), the black and blocky body of a crow posed against a pattern of repeating flowers (White Flower Crow, 2006), or the whorls of a flower head (Raspberry Swirl, 2010). In more than 20 works, from the 1980’s through the present day, from small relief paintings and 8-foot diptychs to an actual flower-decorated chair, this exhibition shows Zakanitch’s art in all its variety of color and form.

Museum Director Masha Turchinsky said, “We are particularly proud to offer this exhibition of artist Robert Zakanitch, whose pioneering work appeared here at the Museum in our Pattern and Decoration exhibition in 2007, a comprehensive survey that was widely recognized. The beauty of this art that celebrates nature is part of our landscape on the Hudson as well as the interior environment in our historic Glenview home.”

One of a number of artists who have recently moved their studios to Yonkers, Zakanitch now works in a downtown space that faces a garden and is infused with the nature he paints. Laura Vookles, who curated the exhibition, said, “I have always admired the brave way Robert Zakanitch embraced the beautiful in painting at a time it was anathema. People have always found joy and comfort in being surrounded by lovely visual objects. Zakanitch takes that tenet to new levels.”

Also on View
Floral Arrangements: Highlights from the Collection
June 3 - September 17, 2017
Floral Arrangements illustrates the ways we express our love of flowers with more than 30 objects from the Museum’s 19th- and 20th-century collections, including paintings, photographs, textiles, and ceramics. The exhibition includes botanical studies by Joanna Kellinger, a 1934 drawing by Georgia O’Keeffe, a “Mimosa” rug by Henri Matisse, as well as photographs by Rudolf Eickemeyer and Edward Steichen. Also on view are the period rooms of Glenview, the Museum’s Gilded Age home on the National Register of Historic Places, where more floral collections can be seen, from decorative arts to stylized flowers on woodwork, friezes, and tiles.

The exhibitions Robert Zakanitch: Garden of Ornament and Floral Arrangements: Highlights from the Collection are organized by the Hudson River Museum.

The exhibition is featured on the HRM website, as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter via the hashtags #RobertZakanitch and #HRMGarden.

THE HUDSON RIVER MUSEUM (hrm.org) is the largest cultural institution in Westchester County and a multidisciplinary complex that draws its identity from its site on the banks of the Hudson River, seeking to broaden the cultural horizons of all its visitors. The Museum collections focus on 19th-century through contemporary American Art; Glenview, an 1876 house on the National Register of Historic Places; Hudson Riverama, an environmental teaching gallery; a state-of-the-art, 120-seat planetarium, and a 400-seat outdoor amphitheater. It presents exhibitions, programs, teaching initiatives, research, collection, preservation, and conservation – a wide range of activities that interpret its collections, interests and communities.