Born 1984, Los Angeles, CA
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
Education
2006 BA Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York, NY
Solo Exhibitions
2015
2015
Rowhouse Project, Baltimore, MD (Upcoming March)
CLEARING, Brussels, Belgium (Upcoming April)
2013
Off Vendome, Düsseldorf, Germany
Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland
Clifton Benevento, New York, NY
2011
VAVA, Milan, Italy
Clifton Benevento, New York, NY
2010
Zak Kitnick, Landings Project Space, Vestfossen, Norway
2009
Murphy Beds, Southfirst Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
2008
Ode to Joy, Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, NY
Group Exhibitions
2014
173 E 94th St. / Chaussée de Waterloo 550, Middlemarch, Brussels, Belgium
To do as one would, David Zwirner, New York, NY
Graham Durward, Heather Guertin, Zak Kitnick, Lucien Terras, New York, NY
Memory Palaces, carlier / gebauer, Berlin, Germany
Taster’s Choice, P.S.1, Long Island City, New York, NY
Imperfect Surfaces, Dieu Donné, New York, NY
2013
A Wand Stirs the Juice, CLEARING, Brussels, Belgium
Garage Show, JTT / Rachel Uffner, New York, NY
Correspondences: Ad Reinhardt at 100, TEMP Art Space, New York, NY
Jew York, Untitled / Zach Feuer, New York
Group Show, 247365, Brooklyn, NY
It-Thou, Michael Thibault Gallery
Snout to Tail, Anna-Sophie Berger, Zak Kitnick, Sean Paul (organized by Zak Kitnick), JTT, New York, NY
2012
Steel Life (organized by Zak Kitnick), Michael Benevento, Los Angeles, CA
WHY DO BIRDS SUDDENLY APPEAR?, Volker Bradtke, Düsseldorf, Germany
Group Show, Westway Gallery, New York, NY
Three Men and a Maybe, 2 Person Show with Polly Apfelbaum, D’Amelio Gallery, New York, NY
Someone Has Stolen Our Tent, Simon Preston Gallery, New York, NY
Straight Up, Family Business, New York, NY
Ruins in Reverse, Room East, New York, NY
2011
To Follow, Clearing, Brooklyn, NY
Heads With Tails , Harris Lieberman, New York, NY
Productive Steps, Mount Tremper Arts, Mount Tremper, NY
Kenji Fujita, Zak Kitnick, Sam Pulitzer: Live at the Acropolis, The Company, Los Angeles , CA
Waiting Ground (organized by Heather Rowe and Tommy White), Kate Werble, New York, NY
Zak Kitnick and Valerie Snobeck (curated by Maxwell Graham), Shane Campbell, Chicago, IL
Tax Day News & Smoke, The Emily Harvey Foundation, New York, NY
Not the Way You Remebered, Queens Museum of Art, New York, NY
Proposal for a Floor, curated by Alex Gartenfeld, 1500 Broadway, New York, NY
The Balloon, Southfirst Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
Offset Summary, Rachel Uffner, New York, NY
2010
Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY
Zak Kitnick STAMPS and Erik Lindman PHOTOGRAPHS, West Street Gallery, New York, NY
The Every Other Day, Ideo Box, Miami, FL
Last Minute Intervention, Shoshana Wayne 2, Los Angeles, CA
One Man’s Mess Is Another Man’s Masterpiece, Bugada & Cargnel, Paris
Zak Kitnick / Fredrik Værslev, curated by Geir Haraldseth, Johan Berggren Gallery, Malmö, Sweden
Visionairies, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, CA
2009
EAF 09 Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY
La Panique du Noyau, l’Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Brest, Brest, France
Between Spaces, P.S. 1, Queens, NY
Trade Secrets, John Connelly Presents, New York, NY
Good Vibrations, Carol Bove, Brooklyn, NY
Speculative Frontier, Light Industry, Brooklyn, NY
If The Dogs Are Barking, Artists Space, New York, NY
Changing Light Bulbs In Thin Air, Hessel Museum, Annandale, NY
It Ain’t Fair, OHWOW, Miami, FL
Showroom, Johan Berggren Gallery, Malmö, Sweden
2008
Salad Days, Artists Space, New York, NY
Alone/ Together, Talman+Monroe, Brooklyn, NY
I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl, Asia Song Society, NY
O Natural, 400 Morgan, Brooklyn, NY
Black Stars of the Silver Screen, Hart Space, Brooklyn, NY
2007
Ask, ASK, Kingston, NY
Coprolalia, UBS, Bard Exhibition Center, Red Hook, NY
Bibliography
2014
“The Gentle Way (JUDO)”, Mousse, December/ January
Dan Rubinstein, “In Miami, Bally Builds a House By Jean Prouvé,” T Magazine, December 3
Kevin McGarry, “Art Basel Beach’s Not-To-Be-Missed Parties and Events,” New York Times, November 28
Jonathan Griffin, “Paramount Ranch,” Art Agenda, February 12
2013
Michael Wilson, “Zak Kitnick, Clifton Benevento,” Artforum, September, Vol 52, p413
Bianca Stoppani, “Meet Brooklyn-based artist Zak Kitnick,” Kaleidoscope online, June 10
Tina Rivers, “Zak Kitnick, Clifton Benevento,” Artforum.com, May 10
Nana Asfour, “Zak Kitnick, Clifton Benevento,” Time Out New York, Issue 905, May 2-8, p34
“Zak Kitnick, Clifton Benevento,” Cura Magazine online, April 10
Andrew Russeth, “New York Artists Now,” Gallerist NY, February 23
Susan Michaels, Fair Weather in Los Angeles: Making the Rounds at Art L.A. Contemporary,” Gallerist NY, January 28
Andrew Russeth, “‘Snout to Tail’ at JTT,” Gallerist NY, January 22
2012
Andrew Russeth, “The Season Begins: Scrappy Expansion, Autopilot Art and New Avant-Garde,” galleristny.com, September 11
Martin Syms, “Top 10 Summer Shows – Rank 1: ‘Steel Life’ at Michael Benevento, Los Angeles,” Kaleidoscope online, August 14
Kevin McGarry, “Steel Life,” Art Agenda, July 20
Geoff Tuck, “Steel Life, organized by Zak Kitnick,” Notes on Looking, July 3
Catherine Wagely, “Steel Life,” L.A. Weekly, June 28
2011
Ara H. Merjian, “Zak Kitnick, Clifton Benevento, New York,” Artforum (online), October 2011
“Zak Kitnick, Clifton Benevento, New York,” Mousse Magazine, Issue 30, October/November, p223/224
Aia Staff, “The Lookout: A Weekly Guide to Shows You Won’t Want to Miss,”, Art in America (online), September 22
“Zak Kitnick at Clifton Benevento – New York,” Mousse Magazine (online), September 20
Andrew Russeth, “Harvest Moon at 425 Oceanview Avenue, Brighton Beach,” 16 Miles of String, September 20
Andrew Russeth, “”Productive Steps” at Mount Tremper Arts,” 16 Miles of String, September 5
Mallory Rice, “Uncommon Projects,” Nylon Guys Magazine, July, p31
“Offset Summary,” The New Yorker, January 16
Jonah Wolf, “Meet Brooklyn Sculptor Zak Kitnick,” The Huffington Post, February 11
Amelia Ishmael, “What We Have in Common, Zak Kitnick, Valerie Snoebeck,” Artslant, May 30
2010
Jonah Wolf, “Zak Kitnick. In the studio with the up-and-coming Brooklyn sculptor,” Papermag, July 17
2009
Alex Gartenfeld, “Out-of-Site; Young Art in Miami,” Art in America, January 12
John Beeson, “Between Spaces at PS1,” Bomb, November 6
Stephen Squibb, “Fall at PS1,” Idiom, October 26
Alice Gregory, “EAF at Socrates,” Idiom, October 1
Emily Nathan, “Interview with Summer Guthery and Zak Kitnick,” ArtSlant, May 16
Massimiliano Gioni; Laura Hoptman; Lauren Cornell, “Younger than Jesus: The Artist Directory,” Phaidon Press, May
Geir Harshald, “Interview with Zak Kitnick,” Landings, January 21
2008
Fan Zhong, “What’s the Polish Word for Art?,” Interview, December 17
Amy Owen, “Marginal Utility,” Salad Days at Artists Space, July 9
September 10 – November 5th, 2011
Clifton Benevento is pleased to announce its first exhibition by Zak Kitnick, a show consisting of two related yet distinct bodies of work that examine the boundaries between art, décor, and utility. Looking at the intersections of commodity production and architectural space alongside that of sculpture and design, Kitnick’s work explores how these parallel worlds borrow from each other equally, acquiring and defusing each other’s potential.
In a series of work entitled Compendium, Kitnick begins with decorative food posters – each one displaying a family of food (items of consumption: peppers, breads, spices, mushrooms) – subsequently framing and arranging them into larger groups. Individually, these posters offer almost encyclopedic information, and at the same time, that information is nearly impenetrable, consumed as a single image. Their destiny is to hang on the walls of restaurants and pantries as decoration. Culled primarily from online specialty stores, alone, each poster is defined by the items depicted, but presented as part of a larger constellation, the structure, the systems of organization and presentation overwhelmingly become the subject matter. Riffing on modernist precedents, each poster becomes part of a strange grid which foregrounds similarity and undercuts difference. In Kitnick’s work, making these distinct typologies interact with each other, and multiplying their information, the ostensible content of the posters soon short-circuits giving rise to a series of odd connections—a glut of delirious information.
Where conceptual art invested itself in what has been called the “aesthetics of administration,” Kitnick explores what he calls the aesthetics of information. By starting with these posters (information and image), Kitnick looks at conceptual arts interest in décor as at once the antithesis and inevitability of art. The work goes on to ask, if it is the fate of so much art to end up as mere decoration, is it possible, by starting with decorative origins, to escape this fate? Information here is no longer simply digits and files; its very organizing system has become an aesthetic itself—a form of decoration.
In two wallbound sculptures, Kitnick builds industrial shelving units, those typically used to hold stock in warehouses, into each other to foreclose the possibility of their function, forming a kind of amped-up organizational system no longer capable of use. The content meant to be held on these shelves is absent, banished across the room to the realm of image and information—the new profit sector. Without this content, the steel shelving itself becomes a thing that is designed, manufactured, transported and sold. In its production and use, it rarely leaves the realm of manufacturing, but as the industrial aesthetic, a sort of form-follows-function design is increasingly bastardized into a style, it, too, is increasingly integrated into the residential. Underscoring issues of form while negating issues of function, the sculptures appear utilitarian without being utilitarian, they have a ‘minimal aesthetic’ without being minimal.
Highlighting a contemporary situation of precarious objecthood, these sculptures have been built into the walls of the gallery, presenting themselves more as architectural hardware than autonomous sculptures. Embedded where wires or plumbing might be, these sculptures both court the functional and evacuate it at once, exposing the labor and theatre inherent in our designed world. In their presentation (centered on the wall) and concealment (inlaid in the wall), there is a simultaneous blocking and offering up to vision. Playing on terms of image and structure, surface and support, Kitnick’s work comments on the divided, neither-here-nor-there status of sculpture today—and of a system of objects more generally. A long wall of arranged books, a grid of posters, an enclosed shelf, each point toward other modes of classification.
In terms of a sort of cultural mobility, the work is perhaps best viewed through a rotating (and circular) set of concerns including the aestheticization of information, information as decoration, decoration as organization, organization as aestheticization.
Born in 1984, Zak Kitnick received a B.A. from Bard College; he currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been exhibited in several New York institutions including PS1/MoMA, Artists Space, Socrates Sculpture Park and Cleopatra’s.
The exhibition will run from September 10 – November 5, 2011; opening reception is Saturday, September 10 from 4-7pm. The gallery is located at 515 Broadway between Spring and Broome streets, New York, NY. Tuesday-Saturday,11am – 6pm. For more information please contact Michael at mc@cliftonbenevento.com.
Ara H. Merjian, “Zak Kitnick, Clifton Benevento, New York”. Artforum.com. October 2011.
PDF OF REVIEW
“Zak Kitnick, Clifton Benevento”. Mousse Magazine. September 2011.
PDF OF REVIEW