MUNICH.- The Staatsgalerie Moderne Kunst in the Glaspalast Augsburg, a branch of the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, is staging a comprehensive exhibition of works by the German-American artist Jerry Zeniuk.

The exhibition, drawn up in close cooperation with the artist himself, examines all of Zeniuk’s artistic phases from the 1970s to the present day. From the very outset, it has been Zeniuk’s aim to avoid making statements in his work and to free himself in his painting from all illustrative, narrative and psychologically related moments. Instead, he concentrates primarily on features inherent to painting: the properties of colours and the purely visual sensation they cause. He converts colours and shapes into dynamic pictorial structures which open up subtle perceptual spaces in the mind of the viewer. In the course of Zeniuk’s career that stretches over more than forty years, this interplay between colour, shape and the picture’s surface has increasingly become a central theme in his painting.

Jerry Zeniuk was born in 1945 in Bardowick near Lüneburg, the son of Ukrainian refugees. His family emigrated to the USA in 1950. In 1969 Zeniuk completed his studies at the University of Colorado with a Master of Fine Arts and then moved to New York. In 1973/74 he worked as a freelance artist in Hamburg. In 1977 he returned to Germany to work for a year in Berlin on a DAAD grant. Since then, Zeniuk has been living as a freelance painter in Munich and New York. Between 1993 and 2011 he held the Chair for Painting and Graphics at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich.

On the same evening in H2 – Zentrum für Gegenwartskunst im Augsburger Glaspalast, right next door, the exhibition “Bernd Zimmer – Second Nature”, showing generally more recent works by the artist, also opened. The joint opening event is a demonstration of the bond and the excellent, long-standing cooperation between the Staatsgalerie Moderne Kunst and H2 – Zentrum für Gegenwartskunst.