The Buried Life
a two-person EXHIBITION by robert zurer and kimi pryor
Exhibition Runs: June 27th - July 25th, 2021
public Opening Reception:
Sunday June 27th, 5-7pm
About the exhibition:
As part of the Da Vinci Fellowship Program, DVAA presents The Buried Life. The Buried Life features paintings from DVAA fellow Robert Zurer and Kimi Pryor. Sharing a love for mystery, the spiritual, and the psychological, these two artists search for meaning by exploring the unknown. The Buried Life borrows its name from a nineteenth century poem by Mathew Arnold.
"The Artist is Pontiff, connecting the present with the beyond ... a midwife for what wants to be revealed to the world." - Ernst Steiner.
Despite the small scale of the paintings in this collection, Zurer and Pryor articulate a sense of expansive pictorial space depicting a world ruled by turmoil, dreams, and memory. As these stories unfold, haunted figures manifest as vessels for the id to perform. Each and every character contains some distilled portion of one’s self. Perhaps via these characters, freed from logic and constructed in paint, we can achieve the necessary perspective to view our own buried lives.
Appropriately, painting in this way requires a deference towards impulse. Each painting is a journey to discover the spaces and characters buried somewhere beneath, or more accurately, beyond. Zurer and Pryor share this similar methodology, a call and response reflected in each newly painted mark. The meandering path that emerges from this process requires time and patience to follow. Ultimately a painting reveals itself, but the powers that make it happen remain a mystery.
The Buried Life will be on view in Gallery 2 at Da Vinci Art Alliance beginning June 27th and will be available as a video walkthrough shortly after.
About the Artists:
Robert Zurer is a native New Yorker and has lived and worked in New York City all his life. Very recently he relocated to Philadelphia where he now maintains his studio practice. He has been drawing and painting since he was a child. He is primarily self-taught although he did study privately for some years with the painter Wade Schuman. He has been an active member of the NYC Crit Club since its inception in 2017. Since 2013, his work has been exhibited in numerous group shows in and around New York. His work has also been shown in group shows in Nashville, New Haven, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Grand Rapids, Philadelphia and Edinburgh, Scotland.
Kimi Pryor grew up in Los Angeles and received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002 and MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2016, where she was a recipient of a PAFA Merit Scholarship and Graduate Grant and winner of the Murray Dessner Memorial Travel Prize. She currently resides and paints in Brewerytown, Philadelphia, is a founder of the Philadelphia-based studio visit blog phillypeer.com, and exhibits in New York and locally, with recent shows at Spillway Collective in Kensington, the Automat-curated NoBa Art Space in Bala Cynwyd and Kitchen Table Gallery in Fishtown.