Andrew Edlin Gallery is excited to announce its first exhibition for Domenico Zindato, the Italian artist and masterful draftsman, best known for his richly patterned, boldly colored drawings made with colored inks on paper. This show will consist primarily of new material with an emphasis on larger format compositions.
Zindato has developed a labor-intensive, meticulously detailed drawing technique in which he uses nib pens and fine-haired brushes to create semi-abstract images on paper, charged with mysterious motifs and elaborate patterns. Set against brightly colored backgrounds, from a distance, Zindato's drawings read visually as abstract and expressionistic. Viewed closely, however, they reveal the intricacy of the artist's inventive pattern making in dynamic swirls and eddies of enigmatic symbols. The artist's signature motifs include birds, eyeballs, floating heads, wave-like ripples and ghostly human forms, as well as hand-drawn letters that recall ancient inscriptions in stone. At once extremely precise in execution and meditative in spirit, Zindato's art suggests affinities with such indigenous art forms as pre-historic cave paintings, aboriginal art, Buddhist mandalas and Native-American decorative patterns. Zindato's palette bears the vivid ocher, blues, greens, and pinks of India and Mexico.
Zindato's drawings transcend conventional category labels, reflecting his essentially self-taught background. A native of southern Italy's Reggio Calabria province, Zindato (b. 1966) studied theater design in Rome before withdrawing from a university program to devote his time to making art. In the 1980s, a formative period for the young artist, he lived and worked in Berlin, where his interests in photography, theater, music, performance and image-making, coalesced in the multi-media events he organized for the emblematic venues of Berlin's fabled post-punk-era nightlife. After leaving Europe and traveling in India and Mexico, Zindato settled in Cuernavaca, where he is still based today.
Zindato was represented by Phyllis Kind Gallery of New York for the past ten years. His work has been reviewed in many periodicals including The New York Times and Art in America. Currently, his work can be seen in Approaching Abstraction at the American Folk Art Museum.