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Biography
North-American painter born in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Robert Zakanitch met Miriam Schapiro during a term of guest teaching at the University of California in San Diego, and early the following year in York the two painters jointly organized a group called the Pattern and Decoration Artists. The group held its first meeting in a SoHo loft space, signaling not only to the art world at large but also to the participating artists that a greater variety of painting was being done than Conceptualism had allowed anyone to believe. This led to the Ten Approaches to the Decorative show in September 1976, sponsored by the Pattern and Decoration Artists themselves, and to a kind of collector interest that turned the recently opened Holly Solomon Gallery into a home for such P&D converts as Robert Kosher, Kim MacConnel and Robert Zakanitch. When Zakanitch took up decorative imagery, he had been working as a Color Field abstractionist faithful to the Minimalist grid as the structural system of his painting. Taken together, the painterliness, the opulent hues, the blooms, and the latticework invite obvious comparison with wallpaper designs, which in fact hold a preeminent place among the artist's acknowledged sources. Selected Public Collections: The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; Collections in Europe: The Ludwig Collection, Aachen, Germany; The Musée de Strasbourg, France; The Rothschild Bank, Zurich, Switzerland.
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