James Graham & Sons Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of drawings by painter John Zinsser, Art Dealer Archipelagoes, which marks the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will be on exhibit from November 20th, 2009 through January 5th, 2010.

These imagined maps—colored renderings made in painstaking detail—reflect the artist’s longstanding interest in New York galleries and their role in recent art history. Here, they’re presented installation-style, on a single wall, a free form grouping of galleries and the artists associated with them. (These dealer “states” represented, include: Richard Bellamy, Holly Solomon, Tony Shafrazi, Xavier Fourcade, Civilian Warfare).

Interviewed, Zinsser comments:

When I started making these drawings, they came to me completely unexpectedly. They started out as open-ended musings, and became more detailed, complex and inter-related as I went along.

I began to see that, taken together, the maps convey a larger sense of family—a family of idiosyncratic characters who collectively define the history of post-war American art.

There is something inherently funny about the whole undertaking, the groupings, the borders and implied territories – and a sense of the larger triumph and pathos, those artists who made it and those who didn’t.

My take isn’t ironic. It reflects a 25-year love affair I’ve had with New York galleries and their exhibitions.

So much of the art from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s has yet to find its proper institutional context, yet the unwritten history here assembles itself–as an amorphous and ultimately felicitous geography.

A second, related series of Auction Lot drawings, based on catalogue pages, follow the complex path of the art object into the market. Iconic works from iconic collections reflect upon the important role of the collector in history.

Zinsser, an abstract painter (b. 1961, New York), is a veteran of more than 30 solo shows in the US and Europe. As a writer, he has extensively covered New York artists and their exhibitions—and has lectured on post-war contemporary art history at The New School University for the past 10 years.