ARTCOLLECTORNEWS Interviews Artist Allison Zuckerman

ARTCOLLECTORNEWS: Please tell us a bit about yourself and your artwork?

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My maximalist work re-presents art history as both homage and critique, combining the low and high of visual language with paint and digital imagery. I am simultaneously interested in how painting, a traditionally slow medium, can collaborate and compete with the fast-paced, ephemeral, and overwhelming digital age that we live in today.

I utilize pixelation to speak to ideas of censorship as well as the emblematic digital mark of the pixel. Just as the ben-day dot of the Pop Artists spoke the language of newspapers and comic books of the 1950s and 60s, the pixel forms all images we see today through a digital screen. The crystal rhinestone embellishments reference the ben-day dots of Pop Art and the sparkling filters frequently used in social media.

ARTCOLLECTORNEWS: How has your creative process changed over the years?

In college, at the University of Pennsylvania, I focused on creating close-up, tightly rendered oil paintings of friends and family.

When I began graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I began to tear up these paintings up and recombine them with other paintings I had made, as well as found imagery and my own photography, to make artistic leaps and discoveries that I found to be much more compelling. I have devoted my artistic investigation into creating a visual language and universe to re-present women from art history, empower them, and make them impossible to ignore.  

ARTCOLLECTORNEWS: Please tell us about your latest body of work

This past June I opened “Open Casting” at Koenig Gallery in Berlin.

“Open Casting” presents a universe created from the imagination of a young girl, who travels through time, to dress up in the language of art history. She gallantly browses through paintings, all from male creators, to select clothing, body parts, accessories, animals, backdrops and sets, to create her own narrative, characters, and world. In doing so, she flattens art historical hierarchies, to make it her own, bringing the past into the present.

ARTCOLLECTORNEWS: Do you have any upcoming exhibitions or projects that you are excited about?

-        A solo museum exhibition that features my never-before-seen early artwork, opening in early November (the museum will be announcing the show shortly).

-       My work is featured in “Framing the Female Gaze,” opening at Lehman College this October.

-       My work is currently on view at the Museu Inima de Paula in Brazil and Arsenal Contemporary in Montreal.

-       A large-scale project for the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.

-       I am curating and participating in a show, focusing on art history, at Library Street Collective in Detroit, which will open in early spring of 2024.

ARTCOLLECTORNEWS: What do you think is the most important aspect of creating successful artwork?

I think the most successful artworks are in a constant and timeless process of revealing themselves to the viewer.

ARTCOLLECTORNEWS: What advice would you give to aspiring studio artists?

Find your voice and paint it.