PURCHASE, NY.- The Neuberger Museum of Art has recently acquired a 2003 oil painting by artist Doug Wada, entitled Zen Lesson. The work, donated by Monica and Rick Segal, currently hangs in the exhibition New at the Neuberger: Recent Acquisitions, on view at the Museum through August 28.

Doug Wada works in the style of photorealism, informed by minimalist composition and pop subject matter. Wada’s paintings present serial repetition of institutional or industrial objects, in large paintings featuring banks of school lockers or stacks of suitcases, and smaller paintings of a single trash can or hubcap, repeated on several canvasses with subtly different interpretations. The geometric repetition in his paintings belies his meticulous brushwork, creating a formal structure upon which to improvise.

Wada depicts in painstaking detail objects that have been mass manufactured, his recreation of wear marks and imperfections giving history and character to the objects. His painterly treatment of surfaces humanizes the anonymous perfection of pop imagery, and his brushwork hints at remote light sources and atmospheric reflections of milieu. By reconstructing objects at their full scale, and by requesting that the work be hung on display at the same height and placement where they would appear in life, Wada emphasizes the active selection of objects by an artist, and invites reflection by placing a prosaic object in a gallery setting.

Wada’s Zen Lesson features a streetlight and trashcan in which the vertical axis of the lamppost emphasizes its canted extensions and the wastebasket’s bent grid and crumpled plastic bag. The symmetry of the work, the base and can counterpoising the spreading arms, the leaden solidity of the pole against the great expanse of sky, the balanced tufts of orange emerging from the gray, are a Zen lesson in order amid chaos.

Doug Wada, born in 1964, obtained a B.F.A. degree in 1989 from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He presently lives and works in New York and has exhibited at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, Sara Meltzer Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery, all in New York City, and in Cologne and Hamburg in Germany. His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions. Wada participated in a residency program at White Room, White Columns in Montauk, New York, and has been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Grant.