Deborah Zlotsky received a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship and NYFA Artist Fellowships in Painting in 2012 and 2018. Her work is in various public, private, and corporate collections in the US and abroad. She has been awarded recent residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, the Bogliasco Foundation, Two Coats of Paint, and the Bemis Center. Zlotsky is represented by Markel Fine Arts and McKenzie Fine Art, both in New York, Robischon Gallery in Denver, and Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta. She has a BA in art history from Yale University and an MFA in painting and drawing from the University of Connecticut. She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and lives in the Hudson Valley.
As a painter, abstraction is a language to tell a story obliquely and metaphorically, to offer a narrative hiding in plain sight. I’m interested in how individual histories become embodied experiences as a consequence of family dynamics, cultural ancestries, and gender. To explore these ideas, I create animated abstract interrelationships to suggest situations and internalized states that are not easily categorized. In my paintings, I imagine situations that are both old and new where I can create beauty and humor to live with my recognition of the intractable layering of history.
Art history informs my language of abstraction and illusion: the mix of flatness and perspective in early Renaissance frescoes; the transmutations of Surrealism; and the colorful animation of psychedelia and Pop. Graphic elements from material culture also shape how I construct an abstract vocabulary. For example, within traditions of Western image-making, stripes can indicate a rejected or problematic status, serving as code for outcasts from society. Incongruities—between geometry and the naturalism of trompe l’oeil, and between fictional gravity and factual flatness—refer to the complexity of internalized sensations and generational repercussions.