Jerry Zeniuk is a painter whose work draws simultaneously on the rigor of American modernist abstraction, the historical depth of European painting, and spatial concepts associated with East Asian art. Emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his practice is often associated with analytic or fundamental painting, while resisting fixed categorization through its sustained focus on perception and experience. This synthesis produces paintings that balance freedom and constraint, immediacy and deliberation, and rely on internal coherence rather than external reference. For Zeniuk, painting is not a vehicle for representation but a means of examining how color, form, and placement operate according to their own internal logic.
Born in 1945 in a refugee camp near Lüneburg to Ukrainian parents, Zeniuk immigrated to the United States in 1950. He has lived in New York since 1969 and has also maintained a long-standing presence in Germany, reflecting a transatlantic orientation that has shaped his artistic development.
Zeniuk’s paintings are characterized by carefully calibrated color relationships and structurally precise compositions. Often built from seemingly simple elements—fields, bands, dots, or dispersed marks—his works unfold through sustained looking, revealing subtle shifts in tone, rhythm, and spatial tension. While his materials remain traditional—paint, brush, canvas, paper—his approach treats them as enduring tools through which painting continually renews itself. Innovation arises not from a break with tradition, but from an exacting dialogue with it.
Zeniuk participated in documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977, and a major retrospective in 1999 brought wider attention to his work, followed by museum presentations in Europe, including exhibitions in Winterthur, Bonn, Munich, and Kassel. From 1993 to 2011, he was professor of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. His work is held in public collections including the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Kunstmuseum Winterthur; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop; Hamburger Kunsthalle; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Zeniuk lives and works in New York and Munich.