Robert Zehnder
Independent
May 11 - 14, 2023
Spring Studios
New York, NY
Press Release
Mrs. is proud to present a solo presentation of eight new paintings by artist Robert Zehnder for Independent New York 2023. For this occasion, Zehnder has made a body of work centered around "Devil's Trill,” a sonata by Giuseppe Tartini. Zehnder’s compositions ruminate on the nocturne, the bedroom, the dream and the threshold between, building upon multiple perspectives and intersecting vignettes.
Giuseppe Tartini’s "Devil's Trill Sonata,” the composer's best-known arrangement, is notable for its technically difficult passages. Written specifically for violin, this sonata was inspired by a particularly vivid dream, which was composed from recollection over a 30-year period. In this subconscious vision, the Devil appeared to Tartini and played the instrument with ferocious virtuosity, delivering a prodigious and unparalleled performance. The faith-driven composer later confessed that his musical composition was but a shadow of what he had witnessed in the dream, for he could not successfully capture the Devil’s full intensity on the page.
Zehnder’s canvases engage the quivering and trembling quality of the Devil’s illusory violin recital. The quick alternation between high and low pitches mirrors the artist’s non-hierarchical approach to building compositions and perspective: a hill at once becoming a shelter and a barren field. The artist focuses on Tartini’s obsession to recall and recreate. It is the process of finishing the composition and the possible failure to accurately represent the original performance which is most intriguing; it is the act of mapping out something intangible into what is now concrete and vivid from a thought, memory, or idea that is faint or unreliable.
Zehnder deliberately forces the viewer's eye into frenetic patterns across his surfaces, mimicking our mind’s attempt to revive a fleeting memory, too distant to accurately remember or to navigate what we fully do not understand. The presented paintings are nocturnes. The artist utilizes this tonality and allows his images to traverse spaces, having a gestalt effect. In “The Stadium (Giuseppe’s Bed)” we find a landscape that can be viewed as the bedroom of the composer, shifting to a bird’s eye view of a city park: trees transform from bed posts to light posts. Furthermore, monochromatic greyscale scenes function as ghost images or echoes of the dimensionally depicted landscapes, creating a haunting and dichotomous effect within the body of work. In these undulating landscapes, the earth becomes the protagonist, split between two versions of itself.
Much like Tartini’s sonata, in Zehnder’s paintings there is a quiet sinister presence veiled by embellishment. Tartini was willing to sell his soul to hear the slight resonance of his subconscious. Despite the arduous darkness of this projected destiny, swaths of green grass, babbling streams, and bulbous shrubs emerge amongst the lifeless earth. The artist portrays the landscape in a state of adaptation, imploding and rebuilding itself. Where there is death, there is life: the Devil is in the details.
Robert Zehnder (b. 1992, New Jersey) earned a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Zehnder’s work has been included in exhibitions at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY; C L E A R I N G, Brooklyn, NY and Los Angeles, CA; Mrs., Maspeth, NY; RUSHMAN, Laura, and Jacket Contemporary, Chicago, IL; Spider Gallery, Wichita, KS and the Ox-Bow School of Art, Saugatuck, MI, among others. The artist’s first solo exhibition with Mrs. was held in Fall 2022. He will have his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, CA with C L E A R I N G in late spring of 2023. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. This is his solo art fair debut.
For more information please contact hello@mrsgallery.com.