Deborah Zlotsky

Deborah Zlotsky works experimentally, beginning with a mark of color in her abstract paintings, or a layer of powered graphite in her semi-abstract drawings, and allowing the gradually forming shapes and images to guide her composition. As she explains: “I work responsively, constantly altering relationships in a process of accumulating, assembling, and revising.” Through this process of pro- and regression, Zlotsky creates robust works, whose muscular forms seem barely containable. Her paintings are full of colorful, interconnected geometric structures resembling honeycombs or carved blocks, dappled with smudges and drips. Her monochromatic drawings abound with animal-plant-human hybrids that seem both plausible and improbable. Though her process is intuitive, Zlotsky approaches her work analytically and grounded in art history. “Although abstract, the work comes out of a personal awareness of the complexity, subtleties and coincidences of being in the world,” she says.