Published on the occasion of Brooklyn-based artist Zak Prekop’s April-June 2018 exhibition at Essex Street, this perfect-bound catalog collects a series of his electric oil paintings on canvas and muslin. As Kyle MacMillan noted when writing for Art in America, Prekop “has honed a distinctive style with an undeniably contemporary feel, all while employing time-honored formalist elements from abstractionism.” Printed in high-resolution and full-color, each such painting is followed by a close-up of itself, so that one can peer into the paint and cloth texture, sharp contrast and intense saturation, and charged palette of primary colors and black and white.
As occasionally discernible from a given artwork’s title, this series has been inspired by music and musicians like American jazz icon Miles Davis’s Big Fun album, Ethiopian pianist-nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, British free improvisation group AMM, American experimental musician Loren MazzaCane Connors, German composer Jacob Ullmann, and American pianist-poet Cecile Taylor. Reminiscent of solarized photography, the imagery itself does seem to experiment with its own visual rhythm, while also evoking semiotic signs, shadow and anti-shadow, and afterimage.