Bone Memory

Sla307 is pleased to present the New York City debut solo exhibition of work by Stefan Zoller entitled Bone Memory.

The exhibition is comprised of black and white abstractions rooted in a multi-generational meditation on absence and memory.  Zoller’s paintings oscillate between densely layered, topographically rich surfaces and reserved, diagrammatic imagery. The combination of these extremes of process and image result in works that simultaneously appear both empty and full.          

The imagery used throughout Zoller’s exhibition is extracted from a group of civil engineering diagrams drawn by his paternal grandfather in the mid-1940’s.  In their original context, they functioned as graphic equations to determine varying stresses and movements that structures undergo when built.  For Zoller, born after his grandfather’s death, they represent not only the man himself but his absence.  The integration and transference of these diagrams into paintings provides a means of connection and communication in the same way that bones provide skeletal structure and functional integrity.     

In the context of these paintings, the diagrams are emptied of their pragmatic objective.  Instead, they are obscured, fractured, and buried which act as metaphors for the hazy and filtered manner in which memory operates.  While referencing his own family narrative, Bone Memory a dedication to the universal experience of separation and loss.  

-S. Zoller, November 2017