YONKERS, NY.- The art of Robert Zakanitch is on view in Robert Zakanitch: Garden of Ornament at the Hudson River Museum through 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, 19751985, 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.”