Robert Zurer, Gut Punch

I make oil paintings. Comprised of figurative and abstract biomorphic forms, they are intuitive and process-driven.

I begin with random or automatic gestures and without external source material or a preconceived idea or plan.

Focused on becoming open to the process, and paying close attention, I await a dialog with the painting, a call and response. It feels like an impulse or message coming into me from the outside, perhaps from our collective unconscious.

In the final stages, an open-ended narrative emerges that almost always describes our human condition – the existential struggle between body and soul.

ROBERT ZURER (b. 1948, New York, NY)

Zurer’s childhood friends were the offspring of parents active in the creative community of Greenwich Village in the 1950s. He started drawing at a young age, when he and his father played a game wherein his father scribbled some lines on paper and asked him to make a drawing out of them. Decades later, this kind of automatic drawing remains a starting point for many of his paintings.

Zurer is primarily self-taught, although from 1999 to 2006 he attended weekly private group classes with the painter and teacher Wade Schuman. Zurer has also been an active member of the NYC Crit Club since its inception in 2017. In 2022 he was accepted into the White Columns Curated Artist Registry and in 2023 he was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center.

In 2018, in order to be able to paint full time, Zurer quit his day job, leased his loft in Brooklyn and moved to Philadelphia.

Zurer's work is held in private collections and has been exhibited in numerous shows in and around New York. It has also been shown in Philadelphia, Boston, Nashville, New Haven, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and Edinburgh.