ZACH HARRIS: STUDIO VISIT
Perrotin New York is pleased to present Studio Visit, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Zach Harris which immerses the viewer in all aspects of his studio practice.
February 28 – April 12, 2025
The artist's presentation includes his signature carved panel paintings, large-scale sculptural forms, and diaristic works on paper which offer an intimate glimpse into the artist's working process. Harris' ornate artworks contain multiple layers of narrative which require deep contemplation, akin to a meditative experience. This is his fourth solo exhibition with Perrotin, and second at the gallery’s New York location.
Zach Harris is an artist whose contemporary practice manages to feel profoundly modern and defiantly ancient in equal measure. Drawing from a diversity of inspirations—not limited to philosophy, classicism, architecture, metaphysics, and cosmology—his output defies easy categorization. His merging of painting with drawing, divine geometries, architectural forms, and sculptural elements results in works that often carry a sense of the devotional—forms that demand contemplation: for themselves and for us.
Formally, much of Harris’ work consists of combining painted panels and canvases with carved wooden frames and surfaces. This recalls, in an abstract and more modern sense, the panel paintings and portable altarpieces for private devotion that existed in the early Italian renaissance. These polyptychs, much like Harris’ own, consisted of detailed scenes combined with ornate and articulated frames, whereby the viewer would contemplate themselves and their place upon this mortal coil. Within his paintings, Harris distills whole universes and conjures Borgesian visions onto their surfaces. Prophetic visions, cosmologies, zodiacs, and patterns abound in a way that seems to psychedelically search for its own truths. In their effect, Harris’s works are a high desert fever dream that is part mystic mountain, part Vegas casino floor, full of color and texture.
Collages, animalistic deities, sentient AI beings, disasters, architectural models, Harris’ work on paper spans the alpha through omega—the beginning to the end. “An artist's journal is the most creative and responsive,” he explains. “You can’t hide, it’s all there. What’s better?”