Draft:Etienne Zack (painter)

Etienne Zack (born July 22, 1976) is a Canadian-US painter.

"Zack’s expressionist-realist palette aspires to the possibility of political struggle in the everyday. His pictures are thus mindful of the inability of abstraction to account for today’s world. In fact, his brush strokes convert the muddy means of abstract painting into a representational form, bringing playfulness, giddiness and a hushed violence into mournful compositions that nevertheless betray glimmers of hope."

Early life and career
Born in Montréal, Canada (1976), Zack moved to Vancouver, Canada in 1997. Zack briefly moved back to Montréal 2008-2010, relocated to Montreal in 2008-2010, and lived in Los Angeles between 2010 and 2016. He now lives and works in Washington State, USA. Zack studied at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada (diploma 2000), attended Concordia University (1997) and attended College St-Laurent in Montreal (DEC ART 1996).

His early paintings depicted street scenes, alleyways and neglected sites of Vancouver’s downtown Eastside, Strathcona and Chinatown where he then lived and worked. The paintings articulated the aesthetics of an alternate, sub economy and the neighborhood’s socio-economic realities. He was selected In 2004 by guest curator and acclaimed painter Neo Rauch and gallerist Gerd Harry Lybke for the 2004 East International at the Norwich School of Art, UK.

In 2005 he had his first solo exhibition with Equinox Gallery in Vancouver, Canada. He has been represented by Equinox Gallery since his initial solo exhibition. In 2005, he won the prestigious RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2005. Throughout this period his depiction of discarded objects and debris in his work gradually morphed into art objects, recognizable art motifs, quotes from films, and the representations of notorious historical artworks. The context of street scenes in his paintings were progressively transmuting into the representation of artist studio, the museum, the gallery and the art fair spaces, while socio-political commentaries persisted. In 2004 he had in his first solo exhibition in Europe at Marina Miranda, Madrid, Spain.

In 2006, invited by curator Solveig Østebø, he had his first major institutional solo exhibition at the Bergen Kunsthall in Bergen, Norway. The same year, he was to participate in a two person exhibition with Jorge Queiroz at Thomas Dane Gallery in London.

He is selected by guest curators Monika Szewczyk and Neil Campbell to participate in the exhibition titled “Paint” at the Vancouver Art Gallery, in Canada 2006–2007. During this period, his work began to re-examine and deconstruct the inheritance of his own education. Themes regarding his early education on the East Coast, heavily influenced by post war American painting, find themselves into his work. His schooling in Vancouver made him re-consider discourse he'd inherited from conceptual photography, post studio practices: the light and space movement, architecture and psychology.

In 2008, then director and curator Séamus Kealy organized a survey exhibition (works from 2003-2007) of his work at the Blackwood Gallery University of Toronto at Mississauga, Canada. He was selected for, Nothing Is Lost, Nothing Is Created, Everything Is Transformed: The Québec Triennial 2008, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the same year won the City of Montréal’s Pierre-Ayot Prize.

In 2009, he was selected to be a member of the jury for the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. A large survey (22 paintings) of his work was curated in 2010 by François LeTourneux at the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montreal (with catalogue: Francois LeTourneux (Author), Seamus Kealy (Author)).

In 2010, he was commission to realize his first major sculpture for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Around 2011 he began contemplating notions around deep history and the motifs of the camera and camera-obscura as an apparatus to contemplate duration and time. Major large scale paintings were produced at the Model Museum in Sligo, Ireland during his residency there in 2011. He was included by curator Séamus Kealy in an international group exhibition titled ‘Up The Walls’ at The Model in 2012.

In 2012, he was selected by Denise Markonish for ‘’Oh Canada’’, the largest survey of contemporary Canadian art ever produced outside Canada at the Mass MoCA, USA. At Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles he co-organized an exhibition titled ‘Building on Ruins’ with Nicolas Grenier and Keith Rocka Knittel in 2012. A large survey exhibition of his work titled “Vision Machine” was organized at the Surrey Art Gallery in Surrey, BC in 2012 by curator Jordan Strom.

He was included in “Out of Site: New Acquisitions” by curator Stephanie Rebick at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2014. As he considered his own process reading and taking notes for making paintings, he started to reflect on how all of history is ‘manufactured history’. His awareness turned towards the significance of digital images, data gathering, and cloud technology as an extension of the artist studio and their impact on our memory and reality. In 2014 he was awarded the Emily Award from Emily Carr University. .

In 2016, a large exhibition survey of his ‘book series’ (2013-2016) was organized by curator Naomi Potter at the Esker Foundation in Calgary, Canada. An exhibition catalogue.was published alongside this exhibition, (Authored by Naomi Potter, Travis Diehl, Carole Anne Klonarides, and Keith Wallace; interview with Naomi Potter and Etienne Zack.

In 2017, he began exploring the conceptual connection between digital images (embedded with computer codes and text) and his long time interest in the historical relationship between text (calligraphy) and image in Chinese ink brush landscape paintings. In 2019, he was part of an exhibition at the Hefei Contemporary Museum, China.

In his most recent work (2023), he merges gel transferred photography, painting, and text into a distinct visual language. The paintings depict a high resolution, saturated, and information-filled picture of our world. His work draw attention to the constant reshaping of perception itself by shifting digital technologies. His paintings search for the increasing difficulty in comprehending and spatially fix visual language.

Selected exhibitions
He has exhibited internationally at galleries and museums such as the:


 * ‘’Etienne Zack: Those Lacking Imagination Take Refuge In Reality’’ Esker Foundation, Canada;
 * ‘’Etienne Zack’’ Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal;  ‘
 * ’According to This’’ Bergen Kunsthall, Norway;
 * ‘’Etienne Zack’’ Thomas Dane Gallery, England;
 * ‘’Vision Machine’’ Surrey Art Gallery, Canada
 * ‘’Lingering Shadows’’ Blackwood Gallery University of Toronto, Canada and Cache Gallery, Montreal Canada

He has had also exhibited in over 25 solo exhibitions in private galleries worldwide. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions at:


 * Asia Art Center, Taiwan;
 * Hefei Contemporary Museum, Hefei, China;
 * Mass MoCA, USA;
 * National Gallery of Canada, Canada;
 * Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada;
 * Vancouver Art Gallery,Canada;
 * MoCA Toronto, Canada; Glenbow Museum, Canada;
 * The Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Canada;
 * Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby, Canada;
 * The Model Museum, Ireland;
 * Torrance Art Museum, USA; Norwich Gallery, England among others.

Notable collections

 * National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada,
 * The Model Museum, Sligo, Ireland
 * Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada,
 * National Fine Arts Museum of Québec, Québec, Canada,
 * Fine Arts Museum of Montréal, Montréal, Canada,
 * Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, Canada,
 * Global Affairs Canada, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Montréal, Canada
 * Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, Canada
 * Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby, Canada,
 * Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Canada
 * Zabludowicz Collection, London, England
 * Canada Council Art Bank, Canada,
 * Musée de Joliette, Joliette, Canada
 * City of Montréal, Montréal, Canada
 * National Bank of Canada
 * Montréal, Montréal, Canada
 * Toronto Dominion Bank, Toronto, Canada
 * Bank of Montréal Collection, Montréal, Canada
 * Royal Bank of Canada Collection, Montréal-Toronto-Vancouver, Canada
 * Loto-Québec, Montréal, Canada
 * Polygon, Vancouver, Canada
 * Granite Club, Toronto, Toronto, Canada
 * Heenan Blaikie, Montréal, Canada
 * Canaccord Capital, Canada
 * Fasken Martineau Du Moulin, Vancouver, Canada
 * Senvest Collection, Montréal, Canada
 * Giverny Capital Art Collection, Montreal, Canada
 * AFK Collection, North Vancouver, Canada.

Awards
RBC Canadian Painting Competition (National Competition)– 1st Prize 2005, Sustainable Arts Foundation, recipient 2021, Emily Award, Emily Carr University, Vancouver, Canada, 2014, City of Montréal Pierre-Ayot Prize – 1st Prize 2008, Brissenden Scholarship - 1999, Mary Catherine Gordon Memorial Scholarship - 1999.

Artist talks - lectures

 * Mozarteum University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria,
 * Esker Foundation, Calgary, Canada
 * Schneiderei, Vienna, Austria,
 * California State University, Long Beach, USA
 * Ontario College of Art and Design University, Toronto, Canada,
 * Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada
 * University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
 * Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
 * Concordia University, Montréal, Canada
 * Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Halifax, Canada
 * University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Canada
 * University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada,
 * Université du Québec, Québec City, Canada
 * Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, Canada
 * Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto in Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada
 * Canadian Art - Gallery Hop (Equinox Gallery), Vancouver, Canada
 * Vancouver Island School of Art, Victoria, Canada,
 * TACO A.C. – Talleres de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City CDMX, Mexico
 * Anant National University, Ahmedabad, India.

International residencies

 * Château de La Napoule, La Napoule Art Foundation, Mandelieu-La Napoule, France, 2022,
 * Caochangdi residency, Beijing, China, 2020
 * Caochangdi residency, Beijing, China, 2019
 * TaoHuaTan residency, TaoHuaTan, China, 2019,
 * Salzburger Kunstverein residency, Salzburg, Austria, 2018, Residency at The Model Museum, Ireland, 2011.