Artist: Zach Harris

Perrotin New York presents Studio Visit, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Zach Harris which immerses the viewer in all aspects of his studio practice. The artist's presentation includes his signature carved panel paintings, large-scale sculptural forms, and diaristic works on paper which offer an intimate glimpse into the artist's working process. Harris' ornate artworks contain multiple layers of narrative which require deep contemplation, akin to a meditative experience. This is his fourth solo exhibition with Perrotin, and second at the gallery’s New York location.

Zach Harris is an artist whose contemporary practice manages to feel profoundly modern and defiantly ancient in equal measure. Drawing from a diversity of inspirations—not limited to philosophy, classicism, architecture, metaphysics, and cosmology—his output defies easy categorization. His merging of painting with drawing, divine geometries, architectural forms, and sculptural elements results in works that often carry a sense of the devotional—forms that demand contemplation: for themselves and for us.

Formally, much of Harris’ work consists of combining painted panels and canvases with carved wooden frames and surfaces. This recalls, in an abstract and more modern sense, the panel paintings and portable altarpieces for private devotion that existed in the early Italian renaissance. These polyptychs, much like Harris’ own, consisted of detailed scenes combined with ornate and articulated frames, whereby the viewer would contemplate themselves and their place upon this mortal coil. Within his paintings, Harris distills whole universes and conjures Borgesian visions onto their surfaces. Prophetic visions, cosmologies, zodiacs, and patterns abound in a way that seems to psychedelically search for its own truths. In their effect, Harris’s works are a high desert fever dream that is part mystic mountain, part Vegas casino floor, full of color and texture.

As a Californian artist, it’s possible to view Harris through an intellectual framework that defines many who chose to head westward to find a new reality. Harris’ architectural adages may recall the aesthetics of Frank Llloyd Wright’s Talesin West, and the experimental Arizona community of Arcosanti, but it is Harris’ own interest in eastern thought—and particularly meditation— that perhaps defines his work the most. Like Buddhist mandalas that map the universe and paths to enlightenment, Harris’ paintings serve as a form of visual meditation. The viewer's gaze endlessly circumnavigates their surfaces, finding details in amongst the whole. Heavens and hells, divine order, and a glimpse at the great mysteries of life, Harris’ works recall the ever-deepening questioning of Zen koan practice.

The term ‘practice,’ in the religious sense, gives insight into much of Harris’ own personal meditations within his studio. Pieces are worked on, reconfigured, amended, and improvised for indefinite amounts of time. As long as they remain in the studio, they are very much a work in progress, sometimes for years at a time. This process of losing oneself in the act of painting is its own form of contemplation, meditation and devotion.

Drawings from Harris’ sketchbooks are on display alongside his larger composite works. These showcase the diversity of ideas to which Harris is constantly engaged. Unlike the slower moving larger works, these intimate drawings are a lesser seen element—a place where Harris feels free to experiment and to build a sort of visual journal. Collages, animalistic deities, sentient AI beings, disasters, architectural models, Harris’ work on paper spans the alpha through omega—the beginning to the end. “An artist's journal is the most creative and responsive,” he explains. “You can’t hide, it’s all there. What’s better?”

- James Casey