David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by three painters: Paul Bloodgood, Leonard Bullock, and Greg Kwiatek. Despite diverse formal approaches, each artist uses landscape as a conceptual point of departure. Resisting direct representation, each simultaneously engages traditions of abstract painting, ultimately affording medium priority over subject.

Forging a dialogue with early 20th-century abstraction and 17th-century late Ming landscape painting, Paul Bloodgood explores the expressive capability of line as an embodiment of form. He attempts to capture both the rough topography and the sensorial experience of landscape, defining it as much as an energetic system as a corporeal one. His compositions begin with preparatory collages that combine photographs and drawn spaces to create a new painting vernacular; the sense of cohesion and distance achieved in the final works, through this mediated process, is echoed formally on the canvases in the comprehensive, aerial-like viewpoint and cool, mineral-based palette.

For over a decade, Bloodgood was the co-owner and curator of AC Project Room, an artist-run commercial space in New York. Since his first solo exhibition in 1990, he has exhibited throughout the United States. His work will be featured in the upcoming group exhibition, Unrelated, curated by Matthew Higgs at Wilkinson Gallery, London, England.

The works of Leonard Bullock straddle several remote, even categorically contradictory terrains in contemporary painting – the immediacy of painterly process and the conflation of that facture with images from the visible world. Bullock’s intent has been to use the full optical potential of the seen world associated with naturalism, particularly naturalistic space, available to abstract painting.

Receiving his artistic training in New York, Bullock has lived and worked in Europe for the past fourteen years; first in Cologne, Germany, returning to where he worked for three years between 1984 and 1987, exhibiting with Galerie Rudolf Zwirner in 1986; for the last twelve years in Basel, Switzerland. Winner of the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Award, the artist has exhibited widely throughout Europe. His solo exhibition at Galerie Karin Sutter, Basel, Switzerland will open in September.

A former merchant marine and current night-guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Greg Kwiatek brings his personal experience to the painterly process with maritime themes and a conservative approach to palette and technique. The artist looks by night, spending hours on a single work in the museum, and paints in his studio by day. This involved and fastidious involvement with the history of painting pervades all aspects of his work, from the close-up point of view to the delicate brushwork. Though he is not directly concerned with representation, his work most closely approaches it, as he examines nature as object.

Since his first solo exhibition in 1985, Kwiatek has exhibited at such institutions as the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has been the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Award, the Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. The artist has been a member of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York since 2003. In 2007, he was the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Princeton Project Space, Princeton, New Jersey.