In his exhibition entitled Studio Visit at Perrotin in New York, Zach Harris welcomes viewers into his meditative, multi-layered creative practice.
ink, inlaid and carved wood. 95.3 x 109.2 x 5.1 cm | 37 1/2 x 43 x 2 inch. Photographer: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
The Los Angeles-based artist Zach Harris creates work that evokes a sense of transcendence and mysticism, blurring the lines between painting and sculpture. His solo exhibition Studio Visit at Perrotin, New York, offers a rare glimpse into his creative process, featuring a selection of works on paper drawn from sketchbooks he fills as a form of meditative practice. Harris’ work is included in several major museum collections, including the Hammer Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In this conversation with Elephant, Harris reflects on the years-long process behind his complexly layered works—pieces he considers never truly “finished.”
What is your process like in the studio?
I usually start my day by drawing and meditating. I go through phases, but drawing has become a way to just sensitise myself and get into this headspace that starts to respond to three-dimensionality and illusion. The studio warmup is like a musician doing scales. I also like to experiment with materials and will make fragments of work that I later incorporate into other works. My work feeds onto itself. Working in this additive process is why most of the works in Studio Visit are more than 10 years old. That’s what’s special about this show. It almost doesn’t feel like a new show, but a mini-retrospective of the past few years.
This additive method of working is visible in several works in the show, like Hanging Zodiacs (Eastern/Western) (2021-2023).
This work began as a dodecahedron, a 12-sided solid, but I felt that wasn’t enough and needed to incorporate it into a greater space. Then I made the circle and the half dome, and just kept adding and adding. Each side is a month and a part of the zodiac. The zodiacs are engaging—there might be a monkey wrestling with a scorpion, for example, referencing this Eastern-Western dualism. It’s telling you that nothing is true and nothing is really correct. You can’t believe or be just one thing. The Boschian figures on the linen represent the greater cosmology. It was made piece-by-piece over a long period of time but it started with just that central dodecahedron form.
Many of your works—like Corner Gate (Profile 1) (2018-2025)—also have sculptural elements.
I am really a painter. I started making frames for the paintings, then the frames became more immersed in the paintings and took on a life of their own. Then some were no longer framed and I was making shaped compositions from wood. This is one of the only “real” sculptures I’ve ever made, though. The idea was that it would frame the walls of the gallery and be displayed with other framed pieces with that same French curve, like a template for the other works in the show which have that same curve in other scales. The perspective of the corner is emphasised and becomes like a portal or an infinity point. There’s some recurring motifs—like this Art Deco, Egyptian, or futuristic vibe that people like to talk about—but it’s very abstract. I wasn’t thinking about the subject matter but thinking more mathematically. The design happened through my way of searching abstractly to make it all work. I would say it’s somewhere between illusion and sculpture.
The exhibition begins with several drawings from your sketchbook, including some published in the recent book Zach Harris: Spiral Bound.
I feel that an artist’s notebook is the greatest form of expression; it’s the most creative and real. It’s so conceptual and there’s a journalist and diaristic side, too. It can contain everything. My paintings contain complex information and this was another way to get to that complexity more immediately. I started this notebook when I broke up with my old gallery. I had so many images in my head and suddenly it all came out; I probably did more than 500 drawings in just two years. All the drawings are ripped from a 9 x 12 inch spiral bound notebook from this project of intensive drawing and notebook-keeping. If you just looked at the paintings, you wouldn’t know there was all this other stuff going on with the artist. It’s like going into my brain.
How do you know when a piece is done? And what makes a “good” painting?
Nothing is ever done. I don’t believe in having so-called “finishing moves,” or doing the little highlight or big brushstroke to make it flashy or something. I really work in small, maybe more tentative strokes to try to feel things out, so nothing can ever be really completed. What makes a good painting is the same as what makes a good song. It’s about surprise and experimentation and touch, and creating a three-dimensional and illusionistic quality that makes the painting come alive. When you can do that as a painter, that’s where it’s at.
Written by Gabriella Angeleti.
Zach Harris: Studio Visit continues at Perrotin, New York, until April 12, 2025.
