Zak Prekop at Harris Lieberman

Zak Prekop’s becoming new abstract painting-collages at Harris Lieberman lists towards the serene. Moderately sized monochrome canvases, painted with cobalt, black, white, napthol and tan, flecked slightly with spots and collaged bas-reliefs, are redolent of Ben Nicholson’s low-rise structures, the chromatically reduced and aleatoric tendencies in the work of Yves Klein as well as the found street- sign collaged work of the French artist Jacques Villeglé. Prekop, a recent graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, proceeds though these influences in a cool and easy stride. Prekop’s exhibition of new paintings and paper work on canvas anticipates his first museum show in Raleigh, North Carolina. Oil paint and pasted paper are disbursed in near chromatic consistency, each painting subsumes into a larger, minutely refined practice.  Individually indistinguishable, the practice as a whole concerns itself with patterned silence. Quietly and with a modicum of inflection, Prekop’s paintings creates a procedural presence through their established practices of collage, pattern and chance. Neither too enraptured by their own received beauty nor overly hypnotized with their semantic intelligence, Prekop’s paintings arrive, magically, at a place of personality.

Untitled (Blue and Dark Blue)

2012

Oil on Canvas

84 x 57 inches  

Untitled, 2011, Oil on canvas, 35 × 27 inches