Michael Zwack is a New York artist whose paintings and sculptures hark back to the decoding responsibilities of Conceptualism while paying mindful dues to Post-Modernism's breakdown of the integrity of representation.
Taken more as an installation than a series of individual pieces, Zwack's photo-derived images--blurry landscapes in dry pigment, generic portraits of ethnic "warriors" awash in a golden aura of paint, a severed bronze heart atop a concrete column and a dead soldier lying face down in a "sea" of simulated concrete--create a world of non-closure, where overloaded Romantic statements are artfully stripped of significance and restored to a status of partial information: neutral, passive, yet (contradictorily) consummately appealing. Zwack's heroes become as gray as his empty landscapes, victims of a decay that encompasses a philosophy of realism as much as life itself.
