John Zurier: Pink Dust
By Alex Grimley
October 14, 2025
In 1949, Barnett Newman, musing on his experience of the two-thousand-year-old Native American mounds in southwest Ohio, recalled how they led to a shift in his thinking about the history of art. Looking out from among the mounds, he realized that space, in painting and in experience, is “common property … the given fact of art.” Half a century later, the composer John Luther Adams, seeking an aural analogue for the stillness and quietude of the Alaskan tundra, dispensed with melody and began writing music comprised of droning strings and rumbling percussion, shifting clouds of tone and texture devoid of narrative or figuration. Like Newman, Adams recognized that to capture the sensation of a place, the artist must clear the way for one’s experience of time. “Only time is personal,” Newman wrote. Only time is “a private experience.”
One of the most striking things about my experience of the paintings in John Zurier’s exhibition Pink Dust, currently on view at Peter Blum Gallery, was the protraction of time they evoked. The surfaces of his paintings pulse and breathe, slowing the pace of our perception. Part of their exceptional quality inheres in the balancing of aspects that are more readily felt than seen—the calibration of color and quantity, the internal scale of the paintings, the proportion of Zurier’s brush marks relative to the size of the picture. How else to account for the convincingness of a painting as inscrutable and economical as Untouchable Wind (2025)?
Light is a central quality of Zurier’s paintings, and much of the variability in the works’ appearance emerges from the techniques with which it is depicted. In the nearly monochromatic Dust and Air (2024), modulations in the accumulation of pigment register as contrasts in the saturation of light, shifting gradually and subtly, like clouds of varying densities passing before the sun. The wisps of light in Kjarval and An Evening in March (both 2025) call to mind the distant glow of moonlight seen through a dense forest’s canopy of trees. To the extent that these paintings capture atmosphere, they convey its all-encompassing ambience, the holistic experience of being immersed and absorbed by an environment. Zurier’s paintings are more like equivalents of weather or atmosphere than images of them. They do not picture transient moments but reflect the passage of time—the labor of Zurier’s establishing and covering the surface, and the attendant extension of our perception.
The atomized brushstrokes and negative space in the paintings May, Morning Evening and Violet Sunlight (both 2025), works in which Zurier constructs a surface through the accumulation of marks, call to mind Cezanne’s late landscapes. The elements in these paintings are so few and integrated that a subtle detail like the minuscule ridges of pigment made by the changing pressure of the brush carries an outsize visual effect, as in Violet Sunlight, where these ridges read almost like areas of shadow. Zurier’s brushwork is particularly prominent in Once for Another (2024), a luminous green painting with swift, springing marks that bloom from within the surface, a lone meadow among the show’s many analogues for sea and sky. Like Cezanne, Zurier is involved with the architecture of the painting, with the linear scaffolding at the edges of pictures like Slow Light (2025) asserting the surface plane and amplifying by contrast the diaphanous character of the scumbled field. A few paintings, Bjarmaland (For D.M.) (2025) among them, felt to me less convincing precisely because they lacked such an architecture.
Among the most compelling trends I have observed in contemporary art is the ongoing and generative exchange between landscape painting and abstraction. Landscape artists like Alex Katz, Eric Aho, and Sarah Martin-Nuss utilize a kind of visual shorthand, painting how seeing feels—mediated and fragmentary—in lieu of precise description, while abstract artists like Betsy Eby, Shara Mays, and Zurier, dispensing with the landscape entirely, summon the qualities and effects of the natural world through mark-making and materiality alone. Though Zurier works in a pictorial language that is sovereign and uncompromising, his paintings evoke the richness of nature and the intimacy of experience. The poetry of Zurier’s art is its generosity of feeling.