Robert Zehnder's 'Resurrection' is a Quest Through Psychological Landscapes
Surreal paintings where the historical and digital coalesce.
American artist Robert Zehnder is making a return to C L E A R I N G for Resurrection, his latest solo exhibition, now on view through April 12. In this surreal suite of oil paintings, Zehnder unpacks the idea transformation, fusing historical tradition and digital landscapes to construct a new mythology.
While the landscapes of Resurrection take clear cues from American Regionalism, they ditch nostalgia in favor of something more slippery. Rather than mere places, these near-melting scenes operate as states of mind – metaphors for how we consume, construct and deconstruct meaning. The land itself seems to breathe, shifting between crisp realism and dreamlike abstraction, as if in a perpetual state of flux.
Playing on the physical and historical, the artist also brings digital escapism into the mix. In doing so, the audience becomes immersed in a gaming map of Zehnder’s own making – a world “shaped by constructed environments, boundless in their illusion yet governed by hidden parameters,” the gallery notes.
“His works exist in a state of slippage, where meaning is never fixed but continuously evolving. This exhibition invites viewers to consider the landscapes –both literal and figurative – that shape their own experiences and to question whether resurrection is a return to something lost or the creation of something entirely new.”
