Artist: Edward Zutrau

Lincoln Glenn Gallery presents Edward Zutrau; Meditations in Hue, an exhibition the artist’s oeuvre, painterly chromatic reflections from his time in Japan (1958-67).

Expressing the beauty and calmness of the world around us—moments of serenity that often go unnoticed in our busy lives—Zutrau was a lifelong expressionist and a fixture in the 1970s New York art scene, and brings these qualities to life in his art, creating meditative compositions that invites viewers to pause and reflect.

Edward Zutrau is among the American artists who worked within the whirlwind of diverse abstraction that blossomed in the decades immediately following the burgeoning of Abstract Expressionism. An educator at various schools for many years during his career, including stints at the Fashion Institute of Technology and New York University, Zutrau received three one-person shows at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Throughout his life, he produced many written descriptions of his ideas about art, frequently philosophical, including published and unpublished brief essays and diaristic expressions of daily occurrences and thoughts concerning art and life.

In a published comment of November 1960 that posits: “To write about painting is exactly that, [the word] ‘ABOUT’ meaning around or nearly, never directly hitting the point. Only the act of painting can do this and then convey it to others purely on the terms of painting, not to simply be looked at, or seen intellectually but to be seen and fully comprehended with our whole being.”

With his sensitivity to the subtleties of color and shape, it also seems logical that Zutrau might be attracted to the sensitive artistic traditions and introspective philosophy of East Asia. Indeed, he took two extended sojourns to Japan between 1958 and 1967 with his family (his wife was Japanese), and created many works there, including the ones in this exhibition.

The majority of works in the exhibition demonstrate how Zutrau’s work of the 1960s chronologically straddled and often visually intermingled the methodologies noted above.