Background
Robert Zakanitch was born in 1935, in Elizabeth, New Jersey to a mechanic father and a homemaker mother who eventually worked in a factory and grew up in Rahway. He lived and worked in New York City.
Robert Zakanitch was born in 1935, in Elizabeth, New Jersey to a mechanic father and a homemaker mother who eventually worked in a factory and grew up in Rahway. He lived and worked in New York City.
Zakanitch says he was a mediocre student who operated a fork lift after high school until he decided to attend the (now-defunct) Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art. There he studied with Ben Cunningham, an early practitioner of Op-art, and the German expressionist Hans Beckmann.
Robert Rahway Zakanitch has been exhibiting his paintings internationally for over four decades. He is one of the founding members of Pattern and Decoration, a group of artists who in the 1970s responded to the reductive agenda of Minimalism and Conceptual Art by embracing decoration and ornamentation in their work. To this day, Zakanitch still incorporates into his paintings “the sentimental visuals of [his] childhood,” as well as costume jewelry, toy dogs, floral patterns, and tessellatinos found in the night's sky.
Robert kept the same color schemes and structures, but incorporated floral motif and a more painterly style. Zakanitch was exhibiting in New York as early as 1968. In 1975 he met Miriam Schapiro while he served as a guest instructor at the University of California, San Diego. Zakanitch has showed his work at galleries in the U.S and Europe, served as a visiting professor around the country, given lectures and participated in panels.
Zakanitch has had numerous solo gallery exhibitions, including shows at the Holly Solomon Gallery (New York) Patricia Faure Gallery (Los Angeles), Jason McCoy Gallery (New York), Robert Miller Gallery (New York), Daniel Templon Gallery (Paris), and Bruno Bischofberger Gallery (Zurich). His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at several museums, including the Las Vegas Museum of Art, the University of Iowa Museum of Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.
Robert's work is in several public collections, including the Denver Art Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. At the time of his June 3 through September 17, 2017 exhibition in the Hudson River Museum, he had recently moved his residence and studio to Yonkers, New York (as stated in the exhibition's literature).
In 2012, Zakanitch wrote and illustrated a children’s book, “A Garden of Ordinary Miracles: An Alphabet Book” (Universe, a division of Rizzoli). He has also illustrated three children’s books: “Last Night I Dreamed a Circus,” “Good Dog” and “Our Farm: By the Animals of Farm Sanctuary.”
Butterfly Frog
Summer Shower
Snowbird
Royal Grape
Sap Sucker Lace
Rococo Revisited
Pig Hollyhocks
Jamboree
Magenta Squirrel
Chicken Flower
Green Glow
Cascade II
Little Red
Red Watercolor
Blue Birds (Lace Series)
How I Love Ya, How I Love Ya
Red Squirrel (Lace Series)
Cotton Seed
Big Bungalow Suite V
The Angel of the Millinery
English Watercolor
White Flower Crow
Robert Zakanitch adhered to the artistic traditions of P&D (Pattern and Decoration).
Quotations:
"Beauty is... It is as natural as breathing. Its allure is transforming and I never thought art was about anything else."
"Painting is still abstract to me, but the end result is not. I want the feeling of paint and image delicately balanced so that they are both at the same time. The introduction of image is so freeing and exhilarating."
“Art making is not about how smart you are, but rather about visualizing what you feel... and for the record, I have never been influenced by wallpaper.”
In the mid-1970s, he became one of the founders of the Pattern and Decoration movement, a form of art inspired by graceful patterns of home furnishings traditionally associated with femininity.
Robert's late wife, Patsy Norvell, was a sculptor and one of the founders of the non-profit A.I.R. Gallery, the first gallery in New York devoted to women artists. Zakanitch has a grown daughter, Amelia.
