First edition of Object Portraits by Eric Zetterquist(2017) First impression Large format hardback in new condition Comes with a dust jacket Published by Nazraeli Press About For over a thousand years the Chinese have painted portraits of art objects in their collections, both to extol the aesthetic virtues of an object and to exhibit the accomplishments of a collector. Following and contemporizing this practice, Eric Zetterquist has created a series of portraits of Asian ceramics dating from 2500 BC – 1400 AD. He has done this by isolating minute form elements of the object, and highlighting the negative space created by them. He further reduces and abstracts these forms by creating large-scale, flattened images in black-and-white with “painterly” edges. Unlike the hard-edged minimalism of the 1970s, the matte, inky black and splashed edges, together with the matte textured paper on which they are printed, are evocative of Asian calligraphy, and create“warm minimalist” abstractions. Not merely photographs of objects, they challenge their viewers to explore concepts of form and negative space in both ancient and contemporary contexts, and remind us that we are part of a human chain that stretches back through the millennia, whose core values of beauty and artistic integrity are stalwart.
