Robert Zakanitch

Strawberry Swirl (Fat Flowers Series, Cont. Ornamentalism, Mixed-media Painting)

2009

Robert Zakanitch has been exhibiting in New York since 1965. He is one of the founders of the pattern and decorative movement. He has had group exhibitions at the Whitney Annual, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. His work can be found in permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Albright Knox Museum, Brooklyn Museum and the Tate Gallery, London. He has had one-man shows in Paris, Basel, Zürich, Berlin, and Koln and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995. Most contemporary art history books include Robert Zakanitch. In 2003, as with his important paintings of pattern and decoration, he exhibited his "Aggressive Goodness" acrylic and gouache paintings a series of dog paintings which show that art can lift the human spirit. In his own words his dog paintings are “to remind us of our compassion and evoke nurturing, caring, sentimentality, romance, kindness, etiquette (that’s right, etiquette), sweetness, respect, beauty and the sense of well being”.