Walter Zimmerman: Vision/Re-Vision

May 1 – 25, 2014

Closing reception, Friday, May 23rd from 6 to 9PM

Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present Vision/Re-Vision, the first solo exhibition of member Walter Zimmerman at the gallery. Vision/Re-Vision features both recent and early works, offering an exploration and excavation of some of the themes that have remained the driving force of Zimmerman’s oeuvre, such as materiality, time, process and the idea of history, both personal and collective.

Zimmerman dates the sparking of his passion for art to the autumn of 1963, when his senior high school art class piled into a charter bus for a 20-mile drive to the Carnegie Museum of Art's 'block-buster' exhibit of Vincent van Gogh. Zimmerman recalls stroking one twisting yellow stroke of paint and being surprised that, from just this tiny contact with that writhing energy, he hadn't been thrown across the room. Zimmerman brings the same vitality found in Van Gogh’s paintings to his own mixed media sculpture, which seem to pulsate with hidden energy as they hang from the gallery’s ceiling and walls.

Walter Zimmerman served in the US Air Force for four years beginning in 1964, after which he earned his BS at Penn State University focusing on art and theater. Zimmerman earned his MFA, concentrating in Glass Blowing, at the School for American Crafts at the Rochester Institute of Technology. From 2003-10, Zimmerman was a full-time Professor of Glass Studies in the Craft Department of the College of Art and Design at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia. His work has been exhibited in national exhibitions as well as included in private collections as well as the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution and the Wallace Library Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology, among others.

Images from left to right: What Happened, 47 x 29”, plastic and shellac: Visitation, dimensions variable, plastic and shellac. Bottom: Bad Romance, 2010, dimensions variable, plastic and shellac