John Zurier: Painting the Weather of Light
PLUS MAGAZINE
November 12, 2025
Known for his pared-down compositions and subtle chromatic harmonies, John Zurier paints as if to measure the weight of air and the passage of light. Moving between the stark clarity of Iceland and the diffused brightness of California, his work captures moments when atmosphere becomes almost tangible. In this interview, he speaks about his latest show, Pink Dust, his ongoing attention to time, and the quiet discipline of seeing.
PLUS MAGAZINE: Your recent body of work was created during extended time in Iceland, often described as having a unique, slow light and pervasive atmosphere. How has this environment, with its fields, sea, and glacier, shaped not just your palette but also your way of perceiving and pacing the act of painting?
JOHN ZURIER: With the power and drama of the Icelandic landscape, it takes a while to see how subtle the colors actually are, and how they’re made more so by the changing weather and light. The yellowing of the grass in October or the way the umber mountains appear dusted with ocher from lichen and new grasses in early June become even more complex when light falls on them. I’m still struck by the cold blue of the light, which seems both transparent and to have a substance of its own. The way this seemingly diaphanous light falls on the exposed hard ground is a quality I look for in my painting as well.
The pacing and act of painting involve seeing. One of the things I enjoy doing in Iceland, and anywhere, is to scan the surface of something and watch how light touches it. I spend a lot of time just watching the sky and the cloud shadows as they move across the slopes of the mountains. My experience in Iceland has helped me to slow down and really look at what’s there right in front of me.
The paintings in my latest show, “Pink Dust” at Peter Blum, are involved with the wind and how something becomes part of the weather—seeing that as it happens. In many ways, it is a farewell to the farm in Iceland where I had a house and studio for the past six years.
P: In Reykjavík, you’ve made more intimately scaled canvases, while in Berkeley, your paintings often expand to much larger formats. How do you experience the relationship between site and scale in your practice, and do you feel the two studios bring out different registers of abstraction in your work?
JZ: I work in a range of sizes, and always have, making small and large paintings in both studios. I have heard it said that abstraction is best worked out on a large scale. But that isn’t my experience. Many of the historical paintings I care about most are small format. Like the position and establishment of the plane of a painting, its nearness or distance, size, and its relationship to scale are something that is achieved. I think more about private and public dimensions, and a small size is a way of constructing a painting for close and individual viewing. The domestic format of an easel painting is something I like.
In Berkeley, I have a 2,000 square foot studio with fifteen-foot ceilings, a long wall of north-facing windows, and an eastern clerestory. All the windows are frosted, so there is no view outside. It’s on a busy corner downtown, and I can hear people talking outside and traffic noise at the stoplight. In Iceland, for the past six years, I had a 135 square foot studio with a seven-foot ceiling and a large window that looked out over a spectacular view. All I could hear was wind and weather, the birds, the occasional tractor delivering hay bales, or a horse trailer picking up and delivering horses. The quality of light in each studio is quite different, and some small paintings over the years made their way back and forth between the studios. I did make a few large paintings in the Iceland studio. One was a floor-to-ceiling canvas that barely fit through the door. Before moving it out, I had to wait for the sleet and the wind to stop.
P: Your paintings resist quick readings, unfolding over time with what you describe as a “silent, moving stillness.” How do you think about duration, not only in the making of the paintings, which often require long dormant periods, but also in how you want them to be received by viewers?
JZ: Duration in painting involves waiting, patience, and timing. It is a continuous process and flow in which sensations from the past and present are fused and experienced subjectively and intuitively. This is what Henri Bergson was talking about when he used the image of waiting for a sugar cube to dissolve in coffee. And for me it is connected to an idea of painting that is whole and complete, even when it appears a careless sketch, and when the brushwork and layers are sometimes put down over a long time—months or years—the overall effect is one and simultaneous. The paintings now take me more time to complete, not because I work more slowly, but because they require more time to see, more time to settle, more time of dormancy between active painting sessions.
Art is a way to connect to something larger than ourselves and, by doing so, connect us deeply with our own humanity. I believe abstract painting can help us do this. I would like my paintings to express the sensation of seeing itself and to offer viewers calm and stillness to counter the world’s raving and brutality. I recognize that there will always be things I intend that are not perceived, as well as things I didn’t intend that other people will see. I’m interested in this open-ended relationship with the viewer, and like and accept that the paintings will carry associations I have no control over. Painting is about giving. And I think, among many things needed on both sides of the equation between maker and viewer, generosity is essential.
P: Many of these works reveal traces of scraping, wiping, layering, and erasure, echoing the Icelandic landscape’s weathering. How do you understand this process-driven history that becomes embedded in the surface, and how do you see it aligning with your pursuit of the atmosphere as material itself?
JZ: My paintings begin with the format of the stretcher, which often has an art historical reference for me or a relationship with a form or object in the world. Then comes the choice of color and texture weave of the canvas, linen, or cotton. I then decide whether or not it is sized and what kind of ground I want. All of this affects the quality of color the painting becomes. I begin by trying to match a color sensation in my mind. Sometimes it comes immediately. Other times, it develops slowly in near misses, and the painting is scraped down. Still, the painting—how the color goes down and its combinations with what has been laid down before or its interaction with the color of the ground—takes on a life of its own. So I’m essentially following the brush. Every touch of the brush, every scrape of a knife affects the tone, and something delicate and wonderful can appear spontaneously. It takes attention and patience to see what is there and not to destroy it.
P: From your participation in the Whitney Biennial in 2002 to today, your work has evolved within an art historical conversation around abstraction. How do you see your paintings positioning themselves within that lineage, between the legacy of modernist monochromes and your own pursuit of temporal atmosphere?
JZ: It’s not really for me to position myself in art history, as I cannot know how posterity will look at what I have done. I’m not working consciously to position myself within any particular lineage or discourse. My relationship to art history is more intuitive and personal than strategic.
I come out of the improvisational paintings of the New York School, especially the work of Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn. I love the work of Robert Ryman, Suzan Frecon, Mary Heilmann, Prunella Clough, Winifred Nicholson, and Raoul de Keyser. But many earlier painters are influential, such as Gwen John, Lars Hertevig, Carl Fredrik Hill, Jóhannes Kjarval, Edvard Munch, Ivan Agueli, Ferdinand Hodler, almost all French painting, and Pietro Lorenzetti and Velázquez. These painters, across different periods and movements, share something in how they handle light, atmosphere, and the material reality of paint itself.
I didn’t approach the monochrome from a stylistic or critical position but painted my way into it through simplification and reduction. I was letting go of things—letting go of what wasn’t essential, what didn’t serve the sensation I was after. And I’m still doing that. Each painting is an attempt to get closer to something fundamental about seeing and light. The monochrome, for me, isn’t about minimalism as an aesthetic program but about finding the most direct way to express atmospheric presence. It’s a clearing away rather than an assertion.
What interests me in the painters I’ve mentioned isn’t their place in a theoretical timeline but the way they allow paint to be both substance and light, both material and immaterial. That tension—between the physical reality of the surface and the atmospheric quality it can evoke—is where I continue to work.
Following his solo exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery, Zurier’s works will be on view as part of Peter Blum Gallery’s booth presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach.