NICOLE FIACCO GALLERY
336 Warren Street
September/October 2009
Jason Middlebrook + Zohar Lazar:
What Are We Doing Here?
The Nicole Fiacco Gallery is pleased to announce a show of recent paintings and works on paper by the artists Jason Middlebrook and Zohar Lazar. The exhibition will present paintings created “exquisite corpse” style, where the artists trade unfinished pictures back and forth until complete, as well as a selection of works completed individually.
Both Middlebrook and Lazar moved to upstate New York full time from the New York City area in recent years. The decision to move to rural upstate New York, away from the center of the art world, was frequently met with “Why? What are you going to do there?” For Middlebrook and Lazar, the answers are family, space, nature and art.
Friends, and now collaborators in art, Middlebrook and Lazar have much in common. Both Middlebrook and Lazar have enjoyed successful careers in New York and abroad. Middlebrook has exhibited his work internationally and is known for his paintings and objects dealing with the consequences of ecological control, interference and destruction. Lazar’s confounding landscapes feel precarious, describing the collision between human beings and nature.
Zohar Lazar is widely known for his illustrations that are regularly published in the New York Times, The New Yorker and GQ. Since relocating to upstate New York, Lazar has focused on paintings unrelated to his commercial work. Lazar’s work has been successfully exhibited in New York, NY at venues including the Jeff Bailey Gallery. He has also exhibited with the Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, NY.
Jason Middlebrook lives and works in Hudson, New York. He received a BFA from the University of California at Santa Cruz, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Middlebrook’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at institutions including the Centro Arte Contemporanea, Sienna, Italy; The Wellcome Trust, London; the Santa Monica Museum of Art; the Aspen Art Museum; the SMART Project Space, Amsterdam; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and the former Whitney branch at Altria. Most recently, Middlebrook had a solo exhibition, Jason Middlebrook: Live with Less, at the University Art Museum, Albany. Middlebrook’s work has been reviewed in every major fine art publication including Art in America, Art Forum and The New York Times.
