Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Michael Zwack
American (b. 1953)
UNTITLED (1985)
bronze, simulated concrete
70" x 8" x 40"

STYLE: sculpture,
Neo-Expressionism

 ©Michael Zwack

In this sculpture executed especially for the Castellani Art Museum, Michael Zwack makes an explicit reference to his feelings about the Vietnam War and war in general. In the sculpture, a man dressed in combat gear seems to be disappearing into the ground. Zwack is most well-known for his evocative landscapes and, more recently, painterly photographs. All of his works are poetic comments on the human condition, referring usually to that which has been lost, or seems at risk of being lost.

Michael Zwack grew up in Buffalo and was one of the founding artists—with Charles Clough, Robert Longo, Diane Bertolo, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Dwyer, and others—of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Holland Cotter, Art in America, 11/85
"Zwack's bloodlines go back to a Conceptualism which loaded images with responsibilities they probably never knew they had...the one-shot masterpiece mentality was radically devalued in favor of the serial dialectic...the truest reading of his show is not individual piece by piece, but as a kind of cumulative gestalt...an extended tone poem, neo-Romantic in disposition, built on a few somber, agitated postmodern chords...they all lock together in a transformative dialogue...Zwack's world is in the grip of mortal weather...Zwack creates a victim-hero hagiography. It is painting as enshrinement and once you've suspended your incredulity, a very affecting conceit...Zwack's despairing landscapes are reassuringly nihilistic terrain...lets conceptual gravity and painterly grace spin out elegaically."

Michael Zwack, Curt Marcus Gallery, Thomas Solomon's Garage, 1993, essay by Rosetta Brooks
"His use of the photographic image though, is less explicit than other artists of the same generation in that it functions in the work like a muse, an invisible source of artistic inspiration, rather than as the concrete presence of an appropriated readymade...Zwack's art brings to mind the nature mysticism of early 19th century German romantic art...His romanticism though, is closer to American wayfarer artists and poets like Henry Thoreau, Albert Ryder, Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac...Yielding to darkness and eclipse, the landscape is reanimated in its imaginary possibilities...For Albert Ryder, the process of building up layers of linseed oil and varnish, helped restore depths to the blacks in his work. Likewise, Zwack's painting method of rubbing, wiping away and building up layers of paint seems, comparably, to seek depth...Zwack's sculpture, "Wayfarer"—a life-size, bronze walking stick on which are carved symbols of all the languages of the world becomes, in these terms, an instrument for naming and thus creating the world...If he identifies with the figure of the wayfarer, it is in recognition of the endangered images of the artist or poet whose self-imposed exile to the wilderness is an attempt to restore to the world the primordial act of creation...As subject and medium, landscape and photography both seem fragile and endangered by an endarkening source which threatens and surrounds them like the dark halo of death...Zwack's tone of lamentation is by no means an expression of despair. His images are oases of the imagination within a culture of disenchantment. They constitute moments of resistance in the quiet dignity of the savage forest, or in the face of a warrior or in the mystery of childhood. They are moments of beauty and strangeness haloed by the dark aura of death...It is untapped territory in which Zwack's enchanted, endarkening visions seem like a prelude to regeneration: 'It's a realm of continuity: if it's dark, it will soon be light; if it's eroding, it will soon be reborn. The landscape is such a hopeful place.'-Michael Zwack"

Michael Zwack, Curt Marcus Gallery, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg, 1990, text (interview) by Douglas Blau
"I choose my images from the world. All I do is embellish them. I don't want to give myself the power of ultimate creation. I'm just a reporter. I'm just trying to bracket what it is that I believe I understand...Anyone who enters a jungle has to find their own way; they have to create their own paths, their own story lines, and these will depend upon the nature of their participation...trying to depict a landscape...That doesn't interest me. The photograph does it so much better...Instead I provide an interpretation of a psychological or emotional or spiritual state. I don't want to limit myself to either the simplicity of gesture or the profundity of manual dexterity and academic painterly skill. What I'm really interested in is creating some kind of hybrid, some kind of alternative being...I look at myself as being an active maker of archaeology. I'm trying to illustrate that truth really lies in things that have been deliberated with time...Maybe all this is done because I'm trying to make things more than what they are. I guess that's my own personal way of venerating the whole idea of human industry..."