David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition exploring the art and legacy of self-taught American painter Jon Serl (Joseph Searles, 1894–1993), which will take place at the gallery’s East 69th Street location. The son of a vaudeville family, Serl acted in traveling shows as a child, took on other unconventional roles, and came to painting seriously only later, in the 1940s. Drawing from his own freewheeling life and myriad experiences, Serl adopted a pictorial idiom and highly expressionistic style that embrace the spectrum between reality and fantasy; his figurative paintings depict still lifes, landscapes, and a range of everyday subject matter—an artist in the studio, a procession of chapel attendees, a couple waltzing—in bold colors and formations that appear as if presented on stage.
Organized by the gallery in collaboration with the artist Sam Messer, this exhibition will feature a robust selection of works by Serl as well as those by contemporary painters—including Messer, Katherine Bradford, Louis Fratino, Brook Hsu, Andy Robert, Dana Schutz, and Josh Smith—who are inspired by his imaginative compositions.
