“Andrew Zimmerman earned a BFA in painting at Rhode Island School of Design, is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, attended The Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and The Vermont Studio Center. He received a Pollock Krasner Award in 2018. His work is represented by Sears Peyton Gallery in New York City. CV available upon request.
”In my work I am interested exploring the intersection between painting and sculpture, art and design, the hand-made and the mass-produced. I am excited by the tension that arises from situating my work in between these categories. I would like my paintings to create moments of unexpected discovery within a language of reconstructable forms.
I fondly remember working with my dad in his wood shop as a young child. Cutting the parts and assembling the pieces into a bench or a table revealed to me a magical journey from a slab of wood to a finished product. More importantly, I experienced the joy and endless possibilities of making things by hand.
In 1980, when I was twelve years old, my parents took me to see the Picasso retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art. I was deeply moved by Picasso’s unique vision and specifically how he constructed his paintings out of a distinct visual language of individual passages or parts. That was the moment when I decided to become an artist.
As a painting student at Rhode Island School of Design, I gravitated toward American abstract art from the 1960s. The honesty and clarity of this work demonstrated that what is left out can be as important as what is included. Interestingly, I began to look at sculpture and painting from this period as one in the same. Later, Matisse’s cut-out collages revealed to me that cutting material was another way to draw, which opened up further opportunities to combine painting and sculpture.
For much of my career, I have been exploring materials that stand outside traditional art making and address ideas of interchangeability and mass production. Early on, I created a series of sculptural paintings using common plastic drinking straws and a blowtorch. More recently, I have been utilizing automotive paint and wood, often adopting the manufacturers’ color names as the titles of my works. Yet by cutting the boards by hand, I create subtle variations in line that highlight the unique hand of the artist. In this way, I am repurposing commercial systems for singular modes of expression.”