Giants and Dwarfs Painting

Michael Zansky (Born 1947, in the Bronx, New York) is an American artist working in installation art, sculpture, painting and photography. In Kathleen Goncharovs catalog essay, "Michael Zansky: The Wetsern Lands" for Michael Zanskys 2008 exhibition at Nicholas Robinson Gallery in New York, she wrote Zansky resembles an archaeologist who digs through Walter Benjamins ruins of history, or a forensic scientist who examines the minutiae of the crime scene of civilization. He investigates humanitys successes, follies, and especially failures, when Goyas sleep of reason does indeed produce monsters. The masterpieces of the great Spaniard cast a long shadow over Zanskys work, especially The Disasters of War and Los Caprichos, as do other works in the Prado such as Boschs hellish triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, and Velasquez enigmatic Las Meninas. Zansky literally sifts through the detritus of our culture for his materials. Garbage bags stand in for water, torn lampshades for towers, and glass marbles for planets. Discarded action figures, tourist kitsch, toy clowns, and thrift store figurines are all actors on Zanskys historical stage.Zanskys art can be analyzed in various series. History as Ruin, which began in 1992 with an exhibition at Berry-Hill Galleries, Exit Art and the Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art, consists largely of 200 individually carved and painted 4 X 8 foot wooden reliefs and freestanding sculptures. In a catalog essay by Donald Kuspit, he states: There is nothing like Zanskys work in modern art, certainly not in contemporary art. It holds its own with Goyas Quinta del Sordo paintings, and extends their fantasy into more irrational terra incognita than Goya ever imagined in his worst dreams.In 1994, Zansky began a series of works collectively titled Traces. For the catalog essay on Zanskys solo show at Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York, NY, Thomas McEvilley wrote: Zanskys work participates in a common thematics of the post-Modern moment a reconsideration of the relationship between nature and culture. In the Modernist period these forces had been regarded as rigorously separate and indeed antithetical. The triumph of culture would consist precisely in its domination of nature: the triumph of nature in turn would be its erosion of culture back into the primeval swamp. Zanskys work goes beyond this dichotomy in directions pointed in the art discourse by such seminal proto-post-Modernists as Robert Smithson and Joseph Beuys.