Murray Zimiles (b. 1941) grew up in both immigrant poverty in Brooklyn and in the heart of the New York art world, as the nephew of abstract surrealist, Boris Margo, who was also his mentor. Art is in his genes. Throughout his life he has traveled widely in Europe and now calls home the rolling farm country of Dutchess County, cradle of American landscape painting. He has lived for 45 years in Hudson River School territory.
Zimiles is technically brilliant and profoundly knowledgeable in both formal pictorial matters and in the history of painting. The more he absorbed the visual elements and sheer beauty of his surroundings, the more he was drawn to the challenge of creating something original in landscape painting. He has understood its essential elements and conventions and tackles each with stunning originality and groundbreaking invention. His is a process both deeply cerebral and emotionally passionate.
By way of his uncle, Boris Margo, who was a student of Futurist, Pavel Filonov (1883-1941) in Russia, Zimiles was aware of the Russian Avant-garde, including the Futurist work of Malevich. Faint glimmers of all their styles can be detected in his paintings, particularly the manner in which Filonov inserted faceted forms across a picture’s surface.
In all his work Zimiles has explored the creation of movement on a two-dimensional plane. With a nod to Italian Futurists as well, he paints a world where multiple angles of perspective and strong directional pulls on the viewers’ attention create a vision of overlapping or transparent fields, animals, buildings, mountains, hills and skies in shimmering and pulsating colors. Like the artists of the Hudson River School he is drawn to the sublime, even mystical, in Nature itself.
The result is an evocative, sometimes disturbing, landscape painting that demonstrates great painterly skill and is extraordinarily complex in structure and in color. In describing the concept behind the show, curator Matthew Baigell explains: “Ultimately, Zimiles’ landscapes are both real and virtual, both traditional and newly invented. They invoke the past, but are very much of our own time. In their own way, they will become part of the chapter on the history of early twenty-first century landscape painting, when in the future that chapter is written.”
Gallery owner, Nikolay Shchukin, states: “We are pleased to be showing the work of Murray Zimiles to the New York audience, especially because of his familial and painterly connection with the Russian Avant Garde. We feel that Murray is one of the most important artists breaking new ground today, and we are honored to present this major survey of his work in our gallery.”