The Comix

Grey Zeien

December 4, 2021 to January 2, 2022

Buster Levi Gallery is pleased to announce The Comix, an exhibition of mixed media paintings on panels by Grey Zeien.The work in this show is  a series of paintings that Zein has been working on since 2010 and are based on imagery from comic books.

Comic books are the genesis of Zeien’s interest in art as he states; “I learned to draw from comic books, as a matter of fact I have early memories of copying and re-copying a particular Superman drawing when I was very young. Marvel comics opened up a new avenue for me, with their hyper-realistic bodies and contorted viewpoints”. In this series of paintings, Zeien has integrated the images from comics with his process of layering and stripping which he has used in in his abstract paintings derived from bill boards. In those paintings, the bill boards became the inspiration for his process of painting: scraping/tearing off, re-layering and redacting where the built up paint relates to the worked over, torn down and re-plastered walls. In a similar manner, the imagery in the Comix series are painted then collaged and  reassembled into surfaces that share the sense of arbitrariness characteristic of Zeien’s bill board paintings.

The imagery and text in Zeien’s paintings is not used to comment on a specific theme or subject. Though some of the works such as Lust, Envy and Greed are more specific in their combination of images and text, the majority of the works are reflective of the zeitgeist of our culture. Indeed, with dynamic juxtapositions of images, scale relationships and/or colors along with the texts suggest moods for each work allowing the viewer to navigate the content for themselves.

Buster Levi Gallery is open Saturday and Sunday from 12-5 pm.

For more information: busterlevigallery.com

Artist’s website: greyzeien.com

Contact: gwzeien@yahoo.com