Zach Harris
American, 1976
Wine King, 2009-10
paint on masonite
17 ¾ x 13 in.
SBMA, Museum Purchase
2011.7
Zach Harris (b.1976) in his Los Angeles studio in 2015.
COMMENTS
Los Angeles first viewed Zach Harris at the Made in LA exhibition at the Hammer in 2013 when he returned from 13 years in New York City, most of which time, he says, he spent at the Met, viewing their enormous collection of hand-crafted objects from all over the world. He also traveled extensively in the Far East, visiting temples and museums, establishing his daily practice in art-making and meditation. Born in 1976 in Santa Rosa into a fourth generation Angelino family, Harris attended first UC Santa Cruz, then Bard College in New York, receiving his BA in 1999, and completing his MFA at Hunter College in 2006. He and his family have now settled in Los Angeles, his studio near his home in Highland Park.
The complexity and totally absorbed nature of this painting allows us to experience Harris’s relationship to his work. He says no work is ever finished. That would be destructive to the nature of his process. The meandering line which encircles and re-circles the painting is a frame or the painting itself—crafted with the same care as the mysterious central image. Ancient icon, ritual emblem, secret message, psychedelic vision—perhaps all those things. Harris often spends two or three years on a single work, and always has many in process.
He describes his experience of developing a painting as one of discovery, often covering the canvas with thousands of tiny, Bosch-like figures, to which he continues to add detail often with a pen or a dab of paint. He likes to begin his day in a meditative mode, retouching his works in process, discovering his next move. The carving is equally detailed, and as in this work, blurring the difference between painting and frame, even bringing the framing motif into the boundaries within the image.
When asked about his religious beliefs, Harris says that if he had to name one it would probably be Buddhism, though he does not see himself as a religious person, but rather an explorer of the iconic, image-making mind of his species, reminding us of care-fully designed 35,000-year-old cave drawings by our ancient ancestors. Our work now hanging in McCormick Gallery certainly speaks to this concept, the image being one of his mountain series, a figure to which he often returns. An unscalable peak, it seems roughly drawn, cathedral spire-like, an aspiration. Some works in this series seem to refer to "namaste", the Hindu greeting, as the mountain becomes hands, palms together, lift-ed in greeting, a deeply relevant image as it honors “the divine in you as it is in me.” Perhaps it is through that universal commonality that we should view his works.
We again find that it speaks many languages from many ages. The care-fully carved modern frame doesn’t seem to match the work. On examination we wonder if the painting may not be in its original frame. The tip of the red diamond at the top of the mountain is cut off and a brown area to the right suggests the image is out of alignment. Then there’s the strange little collection of seemingly earthen spheres in the upper right corner, as if a mark of age, decay or damage.
The clouds rising along the side of the mountain grow larger, tracing a long passage of time. The red diamond on the peak seems iconic, suggesting an epiphany. This wondering captures the core of Harris’s work. Boundaries are blurred—between painting and frame, between then and now, between the sacred and the profane, between what is and what is imagined.
- Ricki Morse, Time, Space and Connectivity: The Expansive Abstraction of Eamon Ore-Giron and Zach Harris, "La Muse", November, 2021
Zach Harris' visionary paintings set within meticulously crafted frames were standouts in last year's "Made in L.A." exhibition at the Hammer Museum, and also something of a revelation.
Harris hadn't yet had a solo gallery appearance in L.A., though he has shown several times in New York. Now his time has come and the nine recent paintings on view at David Kordansky are again standouts and, in themselves, revelations.
The paintings feel intensely interior, like mindscapes more than landscapes, though jagged mountain-range forms are a recurring motif. "G's Early Work" is a genesis scene of thrusting, zigzag spires soaked in divine light.
"Wheel in Picture Light," too, has a rhythmic sequence of ascending triangles - what Kandinsky identified as the most spiritual of forms. Primordial forces are at play here, a sense of charged matter and emergent being. The universe as stripped down and amped up.
The lineage Harris belongs to stretches from the early Italian Renaissance through American Modernists like Marsden Hartley and up to such contemporaries as Steve Roden, passing through the timeless, intricate visions of a gaggle of outsider artists along the way.
Harris builds his frames in wood, surrounding the paintings with intricate patterns and sculptural depth: scooped-out rounds inscribed with tiny yin-yangs; carved channels coursing with directional arrows and tiny inked messages.
There is something of the quest about these works, as earnest as they are lofty. They read as richly conceived illuminations to a text both private and universal.
- Leah Ollman, Review: Primordial forces at play in the paintings of Zach Harris, Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2013
http://www.articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/03/entertainment/la-et-cm-zach-harris-review-20130701
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
The paintings of Los Angeles based Harris evoke mystical visions and optical illusions. With influences ranging from Egyptian hieroglyphics to 19th century Symbolist art, his works challenge the perception of depth through intricate ornamentation and abstract patterning. The artist often creates distinct frames that are inseparable from his paintings, achieved out of a process that he once described as “having long staring matches with a single painting.” According to Harris, the painting’s title refers to the figure "as a mountain, thus a king, and the cluster of grapes in the upper left corner being the wine.”
- In the Meanwhile Part II, 2021