TitleUntitled
Artist
Joseph Zirker
(American, 1924 - 2022)
Date1991
MediumMonotype on white Arches 88 paper
DimensionsSheet size: 60 × 41 3/4 in.
Image size: 53 5/8 × 35 3/8 in.
Mat size: 63 5/8 × 43 7/8 in.
SignedSigned in graphite at LR: "Zirker 91".
MarkingsBlindstamp of SAE at BLC recto.
SubmissionANA diploma presentation, October 14, 1992
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1992.54
Label TextSince the late 1960s Joseph Zirker has developed innovative methods of monotype printmaking, his primary medium. Zirker grew up in rural Merced, California, where his introduction to art was through his father's sign shop. Initially enrolling to study art at University of California, Los Angeles, Zirker's education was interrupted by his service in the armed forces during World War II. Following the war, he resumed his education, first at UCLA and eventually at the University of Denver, graduating with a BFA in 1949. Zirker returned to Los Angeles to pursue graduate studies in printmaking at the University of Southern California under Jules Heller, who would be an enormous influence on him. He completed his MFA in 1951 and between 1961 and 1963 Zirker was a print and research fellow at the Tamarind Lithography workshop in Los Angeles. It was not until the late 1960s, however, that the monotype method of printmaking began to make a true impact on him. The 1968 exhibition of Degas's monotypes at the Fogg Art Museum was a revelation, and by the following year he was experimenting with monotypes using inks of varying viscosity to create color and textural effects. For most of the 1970s his imagery was representational and based on the human figure. This was followed by stylistic and technical breakthroughs in 1977 as he eliminated representational imagery and began to introduce various mixed media elements into his prints, creating works that blurred the lines between sculpture, painting, and printmaking. These assemblages included fabric, twine, thread, and pieces of other prints added into the fibers of the supporting paper. Over the next twenty years, Zirker continued to explore the possibilities of monotypes using different materials and methods until, in 1999, he realized that dry acrylic paint could be removed from a support intact, effectively creating a cast monotype. It is this method that the artist has continued to refine and one that is detailed in his instructional publication The Cast Acrylic Print (2002).
Untitled comes from a series of monotypes that Zirker created in the early 1990s. Like many of the works from that period it is large in scale and is compositionally similar to others from the group. While the term monotype implies a singular impression, Zirker is often able to create variations on an image with residual ink left on the plate after printing by adding additional ink and further manipulating it. "Untitled" combines geometric and gestural elements anchored by the central column containing two ovals arranged vertically. The bottom oval is a spiral, an activating signal for Zirker and as he interprets it, "a path of ever widening or diminishing relationship to its center. The spiral is coiled to both store and release energy. I feel it as internal and personal, emerging and submerging in process of becoming and in process of dissolving in planes of shifting moods of dark and light, in densities and transparencies." These geometric details are reconciled with a vast gestural background of ethereal and fluid wash.
MNP
