ANDREW ZAROU: Views From the Paraffin Parapet

Exhibition Dates: february 2 – 27, 2021

Reception: Thursday, february 4, 5pM - 8pm

The Painting Center is pleased to announce Views From the Paraffin Parapet, the recent work Andrew Zarou in the Project Room.

Andrew Zarou is a visual artist and Brooklyn native. Anyone familiar with Zarou’s artistic outpourings might think of his spray-painted and collaged works on paper, his modular floor-based sculptures, or his ongoing series of gel pen grid drawings. After graduating from Hampshire College with a degree in Painting, Zarou has explored a number of artist channels including music, which he prioritized for ten years as a self-taught guitarist. But his connection to painting always felt core to his identity. For years, when asked what sort of artist he was, Zarou would invariably answer, ‘a painter who doesn’t paint’.

Due to a confluence of circumstances, this changed in 2018 with the acquisition of his current studio in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. At that point, in an unscripted and completely organic evolution, Zarou’s continuous and circuitous artistic path led him directly back to painting. He realizes that the reasons for his abandonment of painting are the same reasons for his return - materially, it is the path of least resistance and the most direct line to the Self.

Inherently, the work of this show is about those returns. Not only and simply a return to painting as medium, but a return and acceptance of a self being revealed via temperamental idiosyncrasies of painting with a brush. Zarou’s current practice is informed not only by these new (and old), painterly traits, but is also by his interests in landscape, music, consciousness, and spirituality. 

Andrew Zarou received his BA in studio art from Hampshire College in 1994. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at GRIDSPACE, Schema Projects, Robert Henry Contemporary, and the Brooklyn Public Library, as well as in group exhibitions at PS1, Transmitter, and Sardine. He received a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2008 and was an artist-in-residence at the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists in Reykjavic, Iceland in 2008, at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2009, and at Yaddo in 2010. Andrew lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

For more information, visit: andrewzarou.net