Double Vision: One Artist, Two Solo Shows, Double the Stripes” 

Art Spiel October 2025

Laurie Gwen Shapiro

In early September, painter Deborah Zlotsky pulled off what few artists even attempt: two solo shows opening at once, on opposite sides of Manhattan. The Light Gets In filled McKenzie Fine Art on the Lower East Side, while Genealogies took over Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in Chelsea. A double dip in one city, on one calendar page. It might sound like a scheduling accident, yet standing in front of her candy-striped canvases, the simultaneity feels deliberate. Zlotsky thrives on overlap: order brushing against disorder, geometry trembling at its edges, patterns that carry memory while stumbling into the present.

The shows don’t read as repetition. They are fraternal twins: different temperaments, same DNA. One series keeps its shirt tucked in, rectilinear, boxy rooms striped and shadowed, with the occasional string or bolt like a belt holding everything in place. The other lets loose, piling shapes into unruly stacks and tangled genealogies. The titles wander too, Not a Line but a Constellation, Tragedy Plus Time, as if each canvas had its own eccentric relative to introduce. Together, the two exhibitions stage Zlotsky’s favorite drama: history pressing against now, leaving marks, drips, scars, and beauty.

That instinct to juggle two modes at once is not just on the canvas, it runs through her life. Petite, dark-haired, and a very youthful sixty-three, she looks like she might be swept away by a nor’easter, yet she managed the artist’s equivalent of two Broadway nights in the same week. “At first it was daunting,” she admitted. “I went down rabbit holes that didn’t seem substantial enough. Then I came up for air and just started painting.”

The split freed her. The Light Gets In is tight, precise, sometimes claustrophobic. Genealogies is looser, slightly tipsy in its balance, more narrative in the way one stripe trips into another. Zlotsky sees them as “adjacent and simultaneous, the same vocabulary, just different protocols.”

Stripes are never innocent. They are prison uniforms and beach towels, chic Parisian shirts and danger tape. Zlotsky knows this. Her stripes wobble between the chic and the punitive, the playful and the institutional.

“Stripes are patterns and cycles at their most reductive,” she said. “Patterns and cycles of history, neurological patterns, family and generational patterns. The paintings are a way to hold disparate parts together, despite shifting orientations and colors. They suggest psychological or historical patterns, layers, and timelines. Things that don’t go together but must.”

Stand back and you see terrain, like a warped map. Move closer and the stripes fracture into something more intimate: muscle fibers, fabric, scars. Valerie McKenzie, her Lower East Side gallerist, puts it this way: “As your eye travels across the paintings, moving from crisp and sharp passages to softer, blurry moments, the experience is akin to memory, and how it shifts from clarity to haziness. And the trompe l’oeil elements, the strings, the pearl, the drop shadows, are subtle and gently playful.”

That slipperiness is what Zlotsky courts. Her pleasure lies in setting up a system, then tilting it off balance. Rectangles blur, tilt, or sprout strange props: string, tape, shadows that don’t belong to anything. Why build order just to watch it buckle?

“I see the hard and soft edges as changes in perception,” she explained. “History is always losing ground to the present, even though it is foundational to it. Like a memory piercing through a moment unexpectedly. It all co-exists.”

None of this was evident from the start. Zlotsky studied art history at Yale, not studio art. Painting came later. “When I shifted from art history to painting, I felt so behind,” she said. “By the time I finished grad school, I was maybe at the sophomore level of an undergrad program.”

Teaching became her crash course. Now a professor at RISD, she designed classes that pushed students toward abstraction and, by necessity, herself along with them. In 2019, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, a recognition that cemented her place among leading contemporary painters. “I had to stay a half step ahead of my students,” she said. “Eventually I realized I felt more free, more curious, more at one with reasons for making work.”

Illusion still lingers. She can’t resist a drop shadow or a fake pearl, but abstraction gave her permission to chase urgency instead of verisimilitude.

Home base is Albany in New York’s Capital Region, where she splits time between teaching, painting, and walking the dog. Her studio fuel is not silence but audiobooks. “As much as I love painting, it’s the listening to the story that gets me into the studio for long hours,” she said.

If her stripes could sing, they would be scored by Motown, R&B, disco, and Broadway. She lights up talking about Pixar’s WALL-E blasting “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” from Hello, Dolly! “That’s the weirdness and tone of my inner soundtrack,” she laughed.

Color itself has taste for her, literally. Zlotsky is synesthetic, wired to experience taste as color. Her palette often comes from childhood candy: sour gummies, bubble gum, sugar bursts. Jolly Rancher pink with licorice black.

For all the sugar-burst palette and disco soundtrack, life barges in. In early 2020, she found herself racing to escape the COVID lockdowns in Bogliasco, Italy. “I have a photo of the Rome airport screen listing all flights canceled except ours,” she said.

Life has constantly intruded: motherhood, caregiving, academia, bills, and yet the paintings kept coming. “Making the work made me feel as if the craziness of it all was nourishing and necessary, even if overwhelming,” she said.

Her canvases juggle contradictions with ease. Stripes tilt, colors clash, geometry unravels, but the whole holds. They are maps of how to live with sweetness and sorrow, memory and immediacy.

Her time-machine fantasy is not Florence or Weimar but something louder, sweatier, more excessive. “Studio 54,” she said without hesitation. “The late 70s, when I was a teenager, the music, the spectacle. That would be fun.”

So here we are: one artist, two shows, candy-colored stripes holding entire genealogies of memory and mess. A soundtrack of disco and Motown. A sensibility that refuses tidy closure.

Zlotsky’s work is about staying upright while the geometry slips, about remembering while forgetting, about holding together the pieces that never really fit. Two shows at once? Of course. The simultaneity is not a quirk of scheduling, it is the point.

Laurie Gwen Shapiro is an award winning documentary filmmaker and journalist whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, New York, The Daily Beast, Slate, and other publications. She is the author of The Stowaway (Simon & Schuster, 2018), a bestseller and Indie Next selection, and The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon (Viking, 2025), named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Amazon, The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, and HISTORY.com. Her New Yorker piece “The Improbable Journey of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes” won the Damn History Award in 2021. She also received the gold medallion in People Profiles from the Silurian Press Club for her New York Times profile of World War II pilot Si Spiegel. She is an adjunct professor in the graduate program at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, where she teaches feature writing. @lauriestories

The following essay accompanies the 2025 exhibitions The light gets in at McKenzie Fine Art, NY and Genealogies at Markel Fine Art, NY.

Deborah Zlotsky: The light gets in and Genealogies

Gaby Collins-Fernandez

In two concurrent exhibitions, The light gets in at McKenzie Fine Arts and Genealogies at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, Deborah Zlotsky poses questions about abstraction and experience from different angles. The light gets in asks the question within the language of all-over geometric abstraction and its history, while Genealogies introduces biomorphism, and with it the idea of abstraction as a subject and an actor.

In both bodies of work Zlotsky’s paintings use the formal tools of abstraction to create both literal and conceptual contrast. The color is vivid to the edge of acerbic, a kind of saturation you can only get with amped up vibrancy and tonal fluency. Large areas and shapes are decorated in stripes, a pattern that simultaneously refers to hatching and optical mixing; striations denoting “CAUTION” when approaching “DANGER” in signage; fashion; and an institutional tool historically used to mark prisoners and social minorities. Rather than “KEEP AWAY,” however, Zlotsky’s punchy color draws a viewer in, beckoning with the cheery lure of candy and overstimulation, as if by getting closer one could taste the paintings with their lashes.

In Genealogies, these shapes assemble into abstract apparatuses that are sometimes cropped and other times contained inside the compositions. In a studio visit, Zlotsky references Rube Goldberg machines, and like these, the paintings move from one edge to another zanily, zipping and changing their function as they touch. Along these joints, they switch from crisp to fuzzy, purple to green, jostled together and bound. The impression is of barely contained energy, an overall composition that has come together for this instant and no other. Even then, the paintings have things to do. Just as an edge gets settled, errant stripes wander off their shapes, wordless speech bubbles emit from shapes in the excitement just before an exclamation.

The energy of many of the paintings in The light gets in is the inverse, from the outside in rather than from the inside out, in paintings that propose and disrupt recessive space. Many of these paintings are set up like boxes that fall apart just when we identify where the space is going, some in split-screen. They acknowledge and contradict the idea of an all-over abstraction in compositions that are simultaneously flat and stacked; some delighting in a confusion between near, far, and the optical illusion that allows them to vary, with others propping striped rectangles atop each other like out-of-control pop-up windows.

The two shows together prompt ideas about figure and ground; or subject and all-over-ness, two historical approaches to abstraction that lost the plot as they turned into ideology. If Genealogies proposes how weird it is to think of space as continuous when our material life is constantly interrupted by texts, spam, traffic, fashion faux-pas forced by unwashed laundry, family members, dumb fun, intrusive thoughts, yesterday’s bad mood, the glare of fluorescent overheads; Genealogies suggests that the accumulation of what we inherit creates forms, yes, but meaning what, and with what baggage? They may be recognizable in their cobbled-together appendages, but what are these wholes, and what do they make, other than art and the enormous effort to keep themselves together?

On this level, Zlotsky’s paintings approach representation-by-association, continuing many painterly traditions of refusing neat separations between art and life. They borrow Thomas Nozkowski’s elegance in turning idiosyncrasy into poetry, and reiterate the post-minimalist feminist dictum that shapes come from our experiences and should return us to them. These are interesting questions for abstraction, especially at a time when the importance of its history is as relevant as its proximity to nice décor. We could all use a little more humor and life in our formalism.

Zlotsky’s paintings are beautiful, but they are not complacent. They make sense in order to unmake it. She talks about how time and history—personal, political, aesthetic—lingers in her thinking in the studio; about how she wants things to hold together, but for that holding to be provisional, just for now. As in animations, movement happens in frames depicting complete worldviews, where any stasis represents the change already occurring.

At a distance of a few inches, as the compositions are interrupted by real and painted drips, tromp l’oeil strings and shadows, and funky smudges, the terms of painting change again by creating a second tense in the work. These often add tension to their compositions, but don’t always resolve pictorially. While the “abstractions” Zlotsky paints make and maintain specific plastic dynamics, the tromp l’oeil elements sometimes appear random, outside the logic of whatever is underneath them. For example, painted strings might decorate the surface, or literally hold pieces of striped shape together. Sometimes a smudge feels like a puff of air or residue generated from within the painting, and sometimes like mildew over the picture plane, as though it were an old Polaroid. In these instances, the paintings remind us that time, too, is inconsistent, by proposing that the time of the picture plane is distinct from the time of the image: the illusion of strings and shadows in the here and now; the muscular logic of composing and painting slightly in the past. Breaking the logic of the abstract images beneath them, like breaking the 4th wall, is activating: what was once style becomes a set with visual characters all of a sudden unpredictable. It’s a reminder that trompe l’oeil historically has been a tool to show off and a marker of artifice, combining the pleasure of virtuosity with the uneasiness of both memorializing and decay.

Laughter, weirdness, logic, interruptions. Heaviness, lightness, randomness. Like stripes, these are terms of embellishment, not definition. Stripes, rectangles themselves, prove that anything can become a pattern with enough repetition, whether feelings or foundational geometry. This is a way of talking about how things happen rather than what is happening; they allow the nouns we usually use to name, as subject, content, opinion, to take a break. Let’s talk instead about what happens when we pin these things down, the stress inflicted upon the now-contained mass.

To talk about art escaping language is a truism; what seems truer is that language escapes language, particularly when trying to track the nuance in life. It turns out that the synthesis of communication requires significant loss. Some things never make it into the machine, but simply condense and drip and rot around the whirring architecture of each moment. Zlotsky proposes a language of abstraction that can mirror the affect of how we live and what is lost or tenuous in the process more accurately because it doesn’t demand the full reflection. The longer you look, the more details delight and teach you how to move up, down, and around; the more the weird fun and chaos of these paintings reach toward how you move, too, how sense and nonsense balance, resplendent. 

Gaby Collins-Fernandez is an artist and writer who lives and works in New York City. Her work has been shown in the US and internationally, including at Peter Freeman, Inc., the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, and el Museo del Barrio, NY. Her work has been discussed in The Brooklyn Rail, artcritical, and in the video interview series, Gorky's Granddaughter. She is a recipient of residencies at Yaddo and The Marble House Project, and a 2013 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Art Award. Collins-Fernandez also has written for Cultured Magazine, The Miami Rail, and The Brooklyn Rail. She is a founder and publisher of the annual magazine Precog, and a co-director of the artist-run art and music initiative BombPop!Up. Collins-Fernandez has a BA from Dartmouth College and an MFA from the Yale School of Art.

The following essay accompanied the 2023 exhibition, Today is tomorrow and yesterday, McKenzie Fine Art, NY

On Today is tomorrow and yesterday

Rebecca McNamara

Each new painting by Deborah Zlotsky presents many things at once: abstraction that models

into figuration; drips and smears that distort hard-edged lines, sometimes negating gravity;

readings around Jewishness and assimilation; and narrative that refutes chronology. The artist

says, “I’ve always been interested in the blur of time . . . how the present is always giving way to

the past or opening up to plans for the future.” On her canvases, the disparate don’t so much

blur as coexist: among and within the cleanly wrought lines, the intentional and accidental marks and smudges, the sanded-down and built-up layers, and the colors that vibrate, complement, or balance live anxiety, humor, prayer, horror, joy, history, love, and family, all together.

In the Diaspora paintings, colors emerge, disappear, reappear—a people moving through,

behind, over, around. The artist offers not a singular event, but centuries of moments, of her

personal, ancestral, and familial travels, abstracted to embrace multiple interpretations.

Throughout the exhibition, flatness gives way to depth as Zlotsky expertly deceives the eye:

moments of trompe-l’oeil figuration pull us into a present reality just as a nearby color field

propels us to recognize paint on canvas, a pause from having to make sense of it all, a moment

to appreciate color and form, and then a sudden shadow that twists us back into a meaning-

making loaded with personal and cultural baggage beyond the art. This play is perhaps most

apparent in the series Ill-fated ancient symbol, in which the artist confronts the swastika. Despite its millennia-old history, she accepts that it is now a symbol for Nazism and white nationalism that cannot be stripped of its power. But by rendering it in this way—where she paints it, yes, but also strikes it into disorder—she challenges us to address the messiest parts of today, yesterday, and tomorrow, the parts we might prefer to ignore.

The paintings encourage us toward vital questions about identity: How well are we paying attention, and to what? And what will we see but not know? Symbols of Judaica—the number seven, chai (life), a striped tallit (prayer shawl)—are apparent to only those who know them. For others, titles offer clues, but such words are also reminders that there will always be so much we don’t know. So perhaps, then, the question is: today, what will we seek of yesterday to open up plans for tomorrow?

Rebecca McNamara is Associate Curator at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and

Art Gallery at Skidmore College, where she organizes interdisciplinary exhibitions, programs,

and class collaborations. McNamara is a curator and scholar of 19th-century through contemporary art and material culture, with a particular focus on textiles and women's art histories.

The following essay accompanied the 2021 exhibition, Gemini at Markel Fine Arts, NY

Soft Power

Stephen Westfall

It never seemed to me that geometry seeks to leave the body behind, to shed its skin and mortal coil for the ether of eternity. Quite the reverse, in fact; like Bruno Ganz’s fallen angel in Wenders’ Wings of Desire, it’s possible the eternal realm is perpetually curious and envious of our brief, baggy existence, and longs to experience . . . what? That excess of vitality accompanying the ripening which precedes decay? To know the ecstasy of grief? Maybe a geometric shape, even a precise meander might occasionally want to just loosen its belt a little. Deborah Zlotsky’s recent paintings propose all manner of ecstasies and comedies as she incorporates her geometries as bodies, and her planes of color with the modeling of limbs, bladders or fruit. In Zlotsky’s hands, what first appears to be flat color slips into equivocaltranslucencies fluctuating between warm and cool, and light and dark. The planes seem to sweat like bodies, as they are interrupted by darker drips that condense from Zlotsky’s chromatic atmospheres.

Zlotsky has written: “I’ve always thought of paintings as bodies to humor, care for, and make sense of. As I’ve aged, I think of each painting as being like my body: strong and fragile.” Here, Zlotsky reminds us that the rectangle of the canvas is also a geometric shape, and that its projection from the wall is the beginning of its embodiment, but only the beginning. A body-sense informs a felt-out paint surface and an internal scale within the abstract composition and, I would argue, a quality of light. Zlotsky’s light shares the nocturnal illumination of de Chirico and Beckmann: even when they are describing daylight it is the daylight of a stage backdrop. It’s a Coney Island of the Mind in her geometric world. The ideal has come down to earth and is enjoying a hotdog and the geek show.

Stephen Westfall has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Nancy Graves Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He received a Rome Prize Fellowship and spent a year at the American Academy in Rome during 2009 and 2010. He is a Contributing Editor at Art in America. Westfall has shown with Daniel Newburg Gallery in New York, Galerie Paal in Munich, Germany and Galerie Wilma Lock in St. Gallen, Switzerland, Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York, Galerie Zurcher in Paris, Lennon, Weinberg in New York. He is currently represented in New York by Alexandre Gallery. Westfall’s works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Kemper Museum in Kansas City, the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark, the Munson Williams Proctor Museum in Utica, New York, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Westfall is a professor emeritus at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He received his MFA in 1978 from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The following essay accompanied the 2017 exhibition, btw at Markel Fine Arts, NY

New Paintings by Deborah Zlotsky

Carmen Maria Machada

Deborah Zlotsky’s paintings are, at their essence, a convergence: of Renaissance images and pop art, of the past and present, of science fiction and reality, of physicality and illusion. It is not surprising then that, when meditating on them, I find myself returning to the idea of the multiverse—parallel existences separated by scrims of physics—and models of cosmic inflation: bands of color demonstrating ever-expanding space, bubble universes stacked on top of each other like poker chips. In these paintings, we are treated to similar abstraction, except where the flat planes of color give way to exquisite three-dimensional detailing, the paratext of everyday objects sinking into or protruding from the canvas: headphone jacks and exhaust pipes and buttons and the rubber nipple of baby’s bottle. Here, Zlotsky has pushed through to the other side, to somewhere else, and it’s surprisingly difficult to look away.

The idea that we can access parallel universes via the wet and puckered places of the world has always been a private fancy of mine, most likely borne from watching the third installment of the Poltergeist trilogy as a too-young kid at a sleepover; a scene in which a wide-eyed, footie-pajama’d Carol Anne backs into a puddle in a parking garage and is grabbed by a set of withered, Crypt-Keeper hands was both terrifying and formative. The entire B movie perseverated on motifs of mirrors and reflections, and struck in me a particular psychological bell that has never stopped ringing—one of illusions, doubles, doppelgängers, things that are not what they seem.

Zlotsky’s trompe-l'œil elements are an illusion, but like so many illusions they are intensely pleasurable; in person, it took superhuman strength not to try and touch the canvas to see if I could insert my finger into one orifice, or if what I perceived to be a string laid on the canvas was in fact a string. (It was not; it was paint.) I was reminded of the first piece of contemporary art to evoke in me the same deliciously frustrating sense of uncertainty: Anish Kapoor’s sculpture “At the Hub of Things,” a massive half-sphere in an inky purple-black in the basement of the Hirschhorn. I was in college and returned to the museum regularly to gaze at it, because I couldn’t tell if it was flat or concave, and desired to touch it to find out. I never did, and so it remains Schrödinger’s sculpture, eternally uncertain.

All of this is not terribly different than the best of the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote gags: that Wile E’s trompe-l'œils of roads and train tunnels, meant to trap the Road Runner, existed in a state of flux, and were both real and not real, depending on who was engaging with them. Again, convergence: a desire to kill and a desire to live, an ability to bend reality meshed with the inescapable gravity of it; an endless cycle of real and not-real and might-be-real and can’t-be-

real and feels-real and was-real-once-but-is-no-longer, all existing in the same space. In the same way, Zlotsky’s paintings beg engagement, invoke a perversely specific desire, repel categories, embody simultaneity, and demonstrate the way something can be everything. And all of this backed by a latent, singular sensation: maybe, if you did reach in, something might touch you back.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." Her essays, fiction, poetry, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the former Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.

The following essay accompanied the 2014 exhibition It happened, but not to you, Markel Fine Arts, NY

It happened, but not to you: New Work by Deborah Zlotsky

Amy Griffin

In Deborah Zlotsky's paintings, forms occupy a charged space that has been worked over and over again. Amid geometric cubes and cylinders, soft, organic forms emerge. A tube exits a quadrilateral shape only to disappear into the background. Shapes recede, project, and hover in ambiguous spaces. It’s easy to lose ones’ bearings — are we above or below these shapes or both at once?

Zlotsky plays with our assumptions about these forms. Some may appear solid, others hollow. Still others appear as open boxes, flaps out, or cubes stacked on top of one another. Our perspective is constantly challenged. Bold, unexpected colors punctuate the work and contribute to the dynamic space. In each torqued rectangle, another moment is revealed. Hints of underpainting, opaque planes and ghostly forms reveal histories of reversals and change: the paintings become documents of accidents and revisions. Drips and smears also mark time, leaving a visible trace of the artist’s hand.

Zlotsky likens her paintings to chronotopes, a termed coined by philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. His definition readily applies to Zlotsky's latest work: “Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.” The paintings seem to have no beginning or end, with idiosyncratic forms flowing between flat and more dimensional space. Zlotsky draws us into a world where everything is connected.

Amy Griffin is a writer, gallerist, and educator in the Hudson Vallery. She is currently the Gallery Director at Opalka Gallery at Sage College, Albany, NY. She received an MFA in Photography from Hunter College, CUNY, and a BFA in Photography from the University of North Texas.