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Caitlin MacBride is an artist currently residing in Hudson, New York she is a lecturer at Rutgers University and a member of the BARD MFA faculty.
In 2020 she was shown in a traveling exhibition entitled, Lost in America at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) curated by artist John Miller. Her panel discussion on Design and ideology alongside Alexander Alberro (Virginia Bloedel Wright ‘51 Professor for Art History, Barnard College / Columbia University, New York), Dan Graham (artist and writer, New York), and, Cameron Rowland (artist, New York) explored the politics inherent in 20th century American design.
In this body of work, she contemplates the rich history of American regionalism by associating 19th-century bonnets from the Metropolitan Museum, New York with the four quadrants of the United States. In one piece affirming this regional system by using Tennessee red clay mixed in pigment of the painting entitled, SOUTH which she Completed while on residency at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2020.
MacBride is drawn to the subject of American Material culture, and her works consider both the tradition of handcraft, especially with recurring references to the American Shakers and the modernist history of Bauhaus. Her work has been written about in Modern Painters, Art Forum, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Dazed Magazine, and Vogue.
Caitlin MacBride is an artist currently residing in Hudson, New York she is a lecturer at Rutgers University and a member of the BARD MFA faculty.
In 2020 she was shown in a traveling exhibition entitled, Lost in America at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) curated by artist John Miller. Her panel discussion on Design and ideology alongside Alexander Alberro (Virginia Bloedel Wright ‘51 Professor for Art History, Barnard College / Columbia University, New York), Dan Graham (artist and writer, New York), and, Cameron Rowland (artist, New York) explored the politics inherent in 20th century American design.
In this body of work, she contemplates the rich history of American regionalism by associating 19th-century bonnets from the Metropolitan Museum, New York with the four quadrants of the United States. In one piece affirming this regional system by using Tennessee red clay mixed in pigment of the painting entitled, SOUTH which she Completed while on residency at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2020.
MacBride is drawn to the subject of American Material culture, and her works consider both the tradition of handcraft, especially with recurring references to the American Shakers and the modernist history of Bauhaus. Her work has been written about in Modern Painters, Art Forum, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Dazed Magazine, and Vogue.
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Yoko Matsumoto graduated from the oil painting department at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts in 1959; she began making abstract paintings around 1960 when she first encountered Liquitex acrylic in 1967 while on residency in New York City. At the end of the 1960s, she discovered painters such as Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, and Clyfford Still, who greatly influenced her pictorial work.
After returning to Japan in 1970, she dedicated the next 25 years to the study of pink, formulating her pigment mixed with chalk to maximize light refraction. Most of her paintings are titled after biblical verse evoking access to the immaterial, spiritual and metaphysical, explaining, "It's a mission, a vocation, like a voice from heaven telling me — and nobody else — to do this, Light, representing life, is one of the essential themes of painting." Her process is physical; traces of her limbs, hands, and feet can be found on the canvas surfaces and amount to a form of prayer in her approach.
Rather than revealing her mission of illuminating the history of art both from the Eastern and Western traditions, an encounter with Matsumoto's organic abstraction inevitably tricks the viewer's mind into looking for a figurative resolution. At times one may see forms or objects only for them to sink back into the formless. The color fields are a mediation on the concept of the ether of what it may look or feel like beyond the body, or more likely what connects the soul to all matter. The show's title comes from Matsumoto's painting, Edom Becomes Wilderness, which references the controversial Old Testament civilization. Her message here may be that regardless of society's mistakes and hardships, the divine evidence in nature leads us back to balance, that we belong to the earth and not the other way around.
Yoko Matsumoto graduated from the oil painting department at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts in 1959; she began making abstract paintings around 1960 when she first encountered Liquitex acrylic in 1967 while on residency in New York City. At the end of the 1960s, she discovered painters such as Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, and Clyfford Still, who greatly influenced her pictorial work.
After returning to Japan in 1970, she dedicated the next 25 years to the study of pink, formulating her pigment mixed with chalk to maximize light refraction. Most of her paintings are titled after biblical verse evoking access to the immaterial, spiritual and metaphysical, explaining, "It's a mission, a vocation, like a voice from heaven telling me — and nobody else — to do this, Light, representing life, is one of the essential themes of painting." Her process is physical; traces of her limbs, hands, and feet can be found on the canvas surfaces and amount to a form of prayer in her approach.
Rather than revealing her mission of illuminating the history of art both from the Eastern and Western traditions, an encounter with Matsumoto's organic abstraction inevitably tricks the viewer's mind into looking for a figurative resolution. At times one may see forms or objects only for them to sink back into the formless. The color fields are a mediation on the concept of the ether of what it may look or feel like beyond the body, or more likely what connects the soul to all matter. The show's title comes from Matsumoto's painting, Edom Becomes Wilderness, which references the controversial Old Testament civilization. Her message here may be that regardless of society's mistakes and hardships, the divine evidence in nature leads us back to balance, that we belong to the earth and not the other way around.
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The exhibition introduces four Japanese artists, the early 20th-century expressionist painter Toshiyuki Hasekawa (1891–1940), inter-war painters Shunsuke Matsumoto (1912–1948), and Saburō Asō (1913–2000) along with postmodern paintings and sculptures by Shin Miyazaki (1922–2018).
All four artists' lives intersected in the 1930s; as a young art student, Shin Miyazaki befriended Toshiyuki Hasekawa, who gave him an oil landscape, (Scenery with Wagon, 1932, oil on canvas) depicting an ox dragging a heavy bale—the mentor imparted the prophetic piece which remained in Miyazaki's possession his entire life. In 1932 before the war and bombing raids, growing dissatisfaction with the conservative climate of the Pacific Art School led Matsumoto Shunsuke to leave and establish a cooperative studio in Tokyo. During this time he met Saburō Asō and Aimitsu who were working in surrealist and expressionist styles openly in rejection of the mounting populism and military ambitions of the Imperial government; together in 1943, they would later founded the Shinjin-Gakai (Emerging Artists Society) as an act of counter-cultural comradery. Painter Was Called Outlaw collectively shows artists in confrontation with oppressive social forces, isolation, the dehumanizing conditions of war and mass violence, but also the dignity, power, and courage of artmaking as an expression of freedom.
The exhibition introduces four Japanese artists, the early 20th-century expressionist painter Toshiyuki Hasekawa (1891–1940), inter-war painters Shunsuke Matsumoto (1912–1948), and Saburō Asō (1913–2000) along with postmodern paintings and sculptures by Shin Miyazaki (1922–2018).
All four artists' lives intersected in the 1930s; as a young art student, Shin Miyazaki befriended Toshiyuki Hasekawa, who gave him an oil landscape, (Scenery with Wagon, 1932, oil on canvas) depicting an ox dragging a heavy bale—the mentor imparted the prophetic piece which remained in Miyazaki's possession his entire life. In 1932 before the war and bombing raids, growing dissatisfaction with the conservative climate of the Pacific Art School led Matsumoto Shunsuke to leave and establish a cooperative studio in Tokyo. During this time he met Saburō Asō and Aimitsu who were working in surrealist and expressionist styles openly in rejection of the mounting populism and military ambitions of the Imperial government; together in 1943, they would later founded the Shinjin-Gakai (Emerging Artists Society) as an act of counter-cultural comradery. Painter Was Called Outlaw collectively shows artists in confrontation with oppressive social forces, isolation, the dehumanizing conditions of war and mass violence, but also the dignity, power, and courage of artmaking as an expression of freedom.
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Alberto Giacometti, Herbert Matter, Matthew Monahan, Jonathan Silver Nicole Klagsbrun is pleased to present an exhibition featuring Alberto Giacometti (1901–66), Herbert Matter (1907–84), Jonathan Silver (1937–92), and Matthew Monahan (1972–), who together share a clear set of existential interests in the human figure, ambiguity, and visual play.
On view are photographs from Matter’s early-1960s black-and-white series documenting Giacometti’s celebrated, exceedingly tall and thin statues. After 1945, Giacometti ceased producing small experimental figures and began to focus on over-lifesize works. The surfaces of these sculptures are fractured and rough, never smooth like a Rodin. By 1947, three main themes had emerged in Giacometti’s art: the walking man, the standing woman, and the bust or head—which are all present in these haunting images.
Matter and Giacometti became fast friends after meeting in 1950, when Pierre Matisse commissioned Matter to document Giacometti’s work in an exhibition at Matisse’s gallery in New York. In a letter to Matter from 1961, Giacometti wrote: I think about [the photographs] every day and now I am impatient to tell you how elated and happy I have been to see the whole series of marvelous photographs. I could not stop looking at them, picking them up one by one and starting all over again, remarking at the great joy they have given me. They are by far the most beautiful photographs that have been made of my things, and, most important, at the same time they have a reality in themselves; each one is a creation in itself, one more beautiful than the other.
A designer and a photographer, Matter left his position at Knoll to concentrate on publishing a book of these photographs. While neither he nor Giacometti lived to see this publication, their widows—Mercedes Matter and Annette Giacometti—completed its production in 1987.
Jonathan Silver, a New York-based sculptor, art historian, and member of the New York Studio School faculty (which Mercedes Matter founded in 1964) was an artist who stayed true to the clarity of his vision, a steadfastness he likely gleaned from Giacometti, the subject of Silver’s Ph.D. dissertation, written under Meyer Schapiro while Silver attended Columbia University. Silver remained fascinated with Giacometti’s attentiveness to frontality and to the distressed psychological tension he imbued in his sculpture’s faces, at times through Cubist and Surrealist approaches. In the 1970s, Silver began producing his first works, and, akin to the beginnings of Giacometti’s sculptural practice in the 1930s, Silver focused on heads and skulls. However, he replaced Giacometti’s symmetry with a fragmented equilibrium as with the bronze Diana, 1987. As if to pick up where Giacometti and then Silver left off, the Los Angeles-based artist Matthew Monahan began to produce variously abstracted sculptures of heads in the 1990s. His work in this exhibition, such as Column III (The Two-Step), 2014, shares the same concern with frontality evident in Giacometti’s art, through a pose that echoes ancient Egyptian statues. More broadly, the work of all three artists evinces a deeply held interest in the ancients—Silver’s art draws on the Hellenistic period, and while he (and Giacometti) preferred a patina that looks as if it has withstood centuries of a harsh climate, Monahan’s sculptures advance a more futuristic take on the ruin. Monahan’s Minimalistic Black and Blue / Us and Them, 2017, for instance, evokes the prison as our contemporary ruin, a site of total wreckage.
The artists are also all skilled draftsmen. Monahan has even remarked that drawing is at the “core” of his work, which is apparent in his heavily worked-over, oil-on-paper Body Electric (dagger dance), 2014. Silver was also known for constantly drawing from both life and the model, and often left a tangle of horizontal and vertical lines visible on the page, to give a sculptural sense of depth and motion to each work, as with Untitled Figure, 1978.
Pushing the expressive potential of the human form in their studios through similar materials and techniques, Giacometti, Silver, and Monahan’s works are neither straightforward portraits nor monuments. Rather, their drawings and sculptures are meditations on being. While together their art is marked by a strong verticality, which emphasizes a rigid inanimateness and the influence of ancient sculpture and related mythology, instead of heroisms there is the feeling of a state of diminishment, even as the sculptures are defiantly indissoluble. Moreover, the shifting patches of light that falls on their carefully produced patinas seem to eat away at the surfaces of the figures. Instead of bringing life, light here seems to desiccate. For all three artists, the figure always carries more than its weight.
Alberto Giacometti, Herbert Matter, Matthew Monahan, Jonathan Silver Nicole Klagsbrun is pleased to present an exhibition featuring Alberto Giacometti (1901–66), Herbert Matter (1907–84), Jonathan Silver (1937–92), and Matthew Monahan (1972–), who together share a clear set of existential interests in the human figure, ambiguity, and visual play.
On view are photographs from Matter’s early-1960s black-and-white series documenting Giacometti’s celebrated, exceedingly tall and thin statues. After 1945, Giacometti ceased producing small experimental figures and began to focus on over-lifesize works. The surfaces of these sculptures are fractured and rough, never smooth like a Rodin. By 1947, three main themes had emerged in Giacometti’s art: the walking man, the standing woman, and the bust or head—which are all present in these haunting images.
Matter and Giacometti became fast friends after meeting in 1950, when Pierre Matisse commissioned Matter to document Giacometti’s work in an exhibition at Matisse’s gallery in New York. In a letter to Matter from 1961, Giacometti wrote: I think about [the photographs] every day and now I am impatient to tell you how elated and happy I have been to see the whole series of marvelous photographs. I could not stop looking at them, picking them up one by one and starting all over again, remarking at the great joy they have given me. They are by far the most beautiful photographs that have been made of my things, and, most important, at the same time they have a reality in themselves; each one is a creation in itself, one more beautiful than the other.
A designer and a photographer, Matter left his position at Knoll to concentrate on publishing a book of these photographs. While neither he nor Giacometti lived to see this publication, their widows—Mercedes Matter and Annette Giacometti—completed its production in 1987.
Jonathan Silver, a New York-based sculptor, art historian, and member of the New York Studio School faculty (which Mercedes Matter founded in 1964) was an artist who stayed true to the clarity of his vision, a steadfastness he likely gleaned from Giacometti, the subject of Silver’s Ph.D. dissertation, written under Meyer Schapiro while Silver attended Columbia University. Silver remained fascinated with Giacometti’s attentiveness to frontality and to the distressed psychological tension he imbued in his sculpture’s faces, at times through Cubist and Surrealist approaches. In the 1970s, Silver began producing his first works, and, akin to the beginnings of Giacometti’s sculptural practice in the 1930s, Silver focused on heads and skulls. However, he replaced Giacometti’s symmetry with a fragmented equilibrium as with the bronze Diana, 1987. As if to pick up where Giacometti and then Silver left off, the Los Angeles-based artist Matthew Monahan began to produce variously abstracted sculptures of heads in the 1990s. His work in this exhibition, such as Column III (The Two-Step), 2014, shares the same concern with frontality evident in Giacometti’s art, through a pose that echoes ancient Egyptian statues. More broadly, the work of all three artists evinces a deeply held interest in the ancients—Silver’s art draws on the Hellenistic period, and while he (and Giacometti) preferred a patina that looks as if it has withstood centuries of a harsh climate, Monahan’s sculptures advance a more futuristic take on the ruin. Monahan’s Minimalistic Black and Blue / Us and Them, 2017, for instance, evokes the prison as our contemporary ruin, a site of total wreckage.
The artists are also all skilled draftsmen. Monahan has even remarked that drawing is at the “core” of his work, which is apparent in his heavily worked-over, oil-on-paper Body Electric (dagger dance), 2014. Silver was also known for constantly drawing from both life and the model, and often left a tangle of horizontal and vertical lines visible on the page, to give a sculptural sense of depth and motion to each work, as with Untitled Figure, 1978.
Pushing the expressive potential of the human form in their studios through similar materials and techniques, Giacometti, Silver, and Monahan’s works are neither straightforward portraits nor monuments. Rather, their drawings and sculptures are meditations on being. While together their art is marked by a strong verticality, which emphasizes a rigid inanimateness and the influence of ancient sculpture and related mythology, instead of heroisms there is the feeling of a state of diminishment, even as the sculptures are defiantly indissoluble. Moreover, the shifting patches of light that falls on their carefully produced patinas seem to eat away at the surfaces of the figures. Instead of bringing life, light here seems to desiccate. For all three artists, the figure always carries more than its weight.
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Swiss Institute (SI) is delighted to present Centinel, the first institutional solo show in the United States by New York-based artist Jasper Spicero (b. 1990, Yankton, SD). Spicero’s multifaceted installations are aesthetically unified by a subdued, bluish palette, and often include craft objects such as hand-beaded jewelry and crocheted doilies, in combination with answering machines, webcams, and other electronics from the recent past. At SI, Spicero has created a new site-specific environment designed to conjure a scholastic setting, suffused with themes of containment, secrecy, and flight. The installation evokes scenes from the artist’s new moving image work, Centinel (2019), which is screened on a monitor in the space.
Recently, Spicero discovered a collection of music and poetry in an online trance music forum that was made by a school friend who passed away in 2009. This serves as the starting point for Centinel. The military associations with the friend’s username, DJ Sentinel, as well as themes of addiction, recovery, and family trauma, inspired the artist to create a surreal soap-operatic narrative video work. In the pastoral surroundings of Marydell Faith and Life Center in Nyack, NY, characters dressed in American Civil War era dress play scenes of surreal and ambiguous family conflict. Arguing over the installation of a new security system, the characters attempt to free themselves and each other from re-enacting cycles of the past, as they move between moments of melodrama, dread, and velveteen sadness.
The narrative is interspersed with footage of a handbell ensemble at Visions at Selis Manor, a center for the blind in Manhattan, who perform using vibrating wristbands programmed to a score. They are accompanied by “angels” who appear to communicate between the two settings using glowing flip phones. Throughout the gallery are new sculptures featuring characters and themes from the video. Several of the sculptures hide or disguise other elements, such as works that combine collapsible chairs with wooden inlay portraits and an assemblage including concealment furniture, a specialist type of design in which firearms can be hidden. They are adorned with smaller objects and imagery consistent within Spicero’s work: flightless birds and butterflies, delicate garments, and architectural elements that highlight the accessibility and inaccessibility of others’ experiences.
Swiss Institute (SI) is delighted to present Centinel, the first institutional solo show in the United States by New York-based artist Jasper Spicero (b. 1990, Yankton, SD). Spicero’s multifaceted installations are aesthetically unified by a subdued, bluish palette, and often include craft objects such as hand-beaded jewelry and crocheted doilies, in combination with answering machines, webcams, and other electronics from the recent past. At SI, Spicero has created a new site-specific environment designed to conjure a scholastic setting, suffused with themes of containment, secrecy, and flight. The installation evokes scenes from the artist’s new moving image work, Centinel (2019), which is screened on a monitor in the space.
Recently, Spicero discovered a collection of music and poetry in an online trance music forum that was made by a school friend who passed away in 2009. This serves as the starting point for Centinel. The military associations with the friend’s username, DJ Sentinel, as well as themes of addiction, recovery, and family trauma, inspired the artist to create a surreal soap-operatic narrative video work. In the pastoral surroundings of Marydell Faith and Life Center in Nyack, NY, characters dressed in American Civil War era dress play scenes of surreal and ambiguous family conflict. Arguing over the installation of a new security system, the characters attempt to free themselves and each other from re-enacting cycles of the past, as they move between moments of melodrama, dread, and velveteen sadness.
The narrative is interspersed with footage of a handbell ensemble at Visions at Selis Manor, a center for the blind in Manhattan, who perform using vibrating wristbands programmed to a score. They are accompanied by “angels” who appear to communicate between the two settings using glowing flip phones. Throughout the gallery are new sculptures featuring characters and themes from the video. Several of the sculptures hide or disguise other elements, such as works that combine collapsible chairs with wooden inlay portraits and an assemblage including concealment furniture, a specialist type of design in which firearms can be hidden. They are adorned with smaller objects and imagery consistent within Spicero’s work: flightless birds and butterflies, delicate garments, and architectural elements that highlight the accessibility and inaccessibility of others’ experiences.
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Times Square Space presents a new film by Jasper Spicero, The Glady Day, made in collaboration with Wills Baker, during the artist’s three-month residency at TSS from March to June, 2018. The film appears in the same space where it was made and in the context of its set. In concert with it are sculptures by the artist created over the past three years. The exhibition is curated by Wills Baker and Tiffany Zabludowicz. Spicero, was born in 1990 in South Dakota, he lives and works in Brooklyn and has had exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world, including solo exhibitions at Johann Berrgren Galery, Malmo, SW, New Galerie, Paris, FR, and Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, FR.
Each of the sculptural objects contains a personality or utility, which functions toward the personal transformation of a teenager named Glady Day. In the film, he faces reconciling a past trauma by participating in a therapeutic program attached to his school. During the run of the program, the initiate meets a series of proctor guides and faces challenges that help him escape projections, which afflict his consciousness. Operating in the logic of video games, Glady must transit levels of increasingly painful tests to reach clarity and regain his personal power. The audience is asked to navigate the same experience.
Spicero’s work considers institutions that mark one’s life. Schools, corporate offices, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and prisons, each manipulate, control, and change their occupants. Integrated into the work are paintings made by prisoners incarcerated at the Federal Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, 1976. The works were products of an inmate enrichment program led by Kanas landscape painter, David Melby. As objects, they are both a record of rehabilitative pathways for the incarcerated and extensions of Spicero’s conflation of the prison metaphor.
The tactility of Spicero’s objects and sensitivity of their hand-made construction appeal to the child while containing the roadmap for reintegrating the conflicted adult subject. Both the paintings and sculptures exist as tools and representations of the symbolic and metaphysical act of transformative process and rehabilitation. They highlight the innate ability of the human mind to reach beyond its physical confines toward innocence and consolidation.
Times Square Space presents a new film by Jasper Spicero, The Glady Day, made in collaboration with Wills Baker, during the artist’s three-month residency at TSS from March to June, 2018. The film appears in the same space where it was made and in the context of its set. In concert with it are sculptures by the artist created over the past three years. The exhibition is curated by Wills Baker and Tiffany Zabludowicz. Spicero, was born in 1990 in South Dakota, he lives and works in Brooklyn and has had exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world, including solo exhibitions at Johann Berrgren Galery, Malmo, SW, New Galerie, Paris, FR, and Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, FR.
Each of the sculptural objects contains a personality or utility, which functions toward the personal transformation of a teenager named Glady Day. In the film, he faces reconciling a past trauma by participating in a therapeutic program attached to his school. During the run of the program, the initiate meets a series of proctor guides and faces challenges that help him escape projections, which afflict his consciousness. Operating in the logic of video games, Glady must transit levels of increasingly painful tests to reach clarity and regain his personal power. The audience is asked to navigate the same experience.
Spicero’s work considers institutions that mark one’s life. Schools, corporate offices, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and prisons, each manipulate, control, and change their occupants. Integrated into the work are paintings made by prisoners incarcerated at the Federal Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, 1976. The works were products of an inmate enrichment program led by Kanas landscape painter, David Melby. As objects, they are both a record of rehabilitative pathways for the incarcerated and extensions of Spicero’s conflation of the prison metaphor.
The tactility of Spicero’s objects and sensitivity of their hand-made construction appeal to the child while containing the roadmap for reintegrating the conflicted adult subject. Both the paintings and sculptures exist as tools and representations of the symbolic and metaphysical act of transformative process and rehabilitation. They highlight the innate ability of the human mind to reach beyond its physical confines toward innocence and consolidation.
Lucas Zallmann
Curated by Wills Baker
57 Orchard Street
New York, NY
November 9–December 10, 2013
For his debut New York exhibition, Comfort Zones, Austrian artist Lucas Zallmann presents a sculptural installation, film, and works on paper curated by Wills Baker.
The exhibition interrogates themes of psychological habit, knowledge-preservation, and New York City's Wall Street. Comfort Zones will inaugurate 57 Orchard Street, previously home to the studio of Richard Hambleton.
Born and raised in Austria, Zallmann is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, where he was the protégé of Gelitin co-founder Florian Reither. Zallmann's work interrogates contemporary informational and financial systems, inspired by a degree in economics, which has evolved into a line of artistic inquiry Zallmann calls the "embodiment of knowledge." Zallmann defines this "embodiment" as a society's physical absorption of cultural myths into a central false "common" knowledge, which, over time, becomes "fact." His work responds to this act of "knowing" as an absorbent and intuitive emotional process.
From drawings described as snapshots of human consciousness entitled "mindscapes" to free-hand text abstractions made with sulfur and neon adorned fridge installations -- Zallmann explores the nature of comfort and assumption and the banal mechanics of daily life—the systematic, the familiar, and routine. In drawing attention to these linear social grids and constructions, he lifts the veil of western social engineering, which keeps conventions of knowing as the assumption in place.
Curated by Wills Baker
57 Orchard Street
New York, NY
November 9–December 10, 2013
For his debut New York exhibition, Comfort Zones, Austrian artist Lucas Zallmann presents a sculptural installation, film, and works on paper curated by Wills Baker.
The exhibition interrogates themes of psychological habit, knowledge-preservation, and New York City's Wall Street. Comfort Zones will inaugurate 57 Orchard Street, previously home to the studio of Richard Hambleton.
Born and raised in Austria, Zallmann is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, where he was the protégé of Gelitin co-founder Florian Reither. Zallmann's work interrogates contemporary informational and financial systems, inspired by a degree in economics, which has evolved into a line of artistic inquiry Zallmann calls the "embodiment of knowledge." Zallmann defines this "embodiment" as a society's physical absorption of cultural myths into a central false "common" knowledge, which, over time, becomes "fact." His work responds to this act of "knowing" as an absorbent and intuitive emotional process.
From drawings described as snapshots of human consciousness entitled "mindscapes" to free-hand text abstractions made with sulfur and neon adorned fridge installations -- Zallmann explores the nature of comfort and assumption and the banal mechanics of daily life—the systematic, the familiar, and routine. In drawing attention to these linear social grids and constructions, he lifts the veil of western social engineering, which keeps conventions of knowing as the assumption in place.