Bio

The paintings of Zach Harris (b. 1976 Santa Rosa, California) are intricate jewels of hallucinatory and ecstatic space. While their idiosyncratic sensibility brings to mind the works of self-taught visionaries, they are also steeped in long traditions of painting, both Eastern and Western, including color field, op art, romanticism, symbolism, Indian miniatures, and early Italian Renaissance altarpieces. The illusionistic spaces rendered vacillate between abstraction and representation, each one a world unto itself. Framing each painting is an intricate handmade wooden relief. Forms and patterns that emerge within the paintings are often mirrored in the surrounding frames, creating a tension between the illusionary space of the painting and the tactility of the adjoining relief. Unabashedly delving into the realms of the mystical and the metaphysical, the works contain echoes of Paul Klee, Odilon Redon, and Gustave Moreau. Peepholes into Harris’s imagination, his paintings argue for the possibility that artwork can be transcendent.