Born 1975, Ieud, Romania. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Dumitru Gorzo moves freely between genres, platforms, and media. While the medium’s fragility and fickleness come with their dictates, he revels in its presence within his works, exploiting its particularities. Gorzo yields to the nature of the surface, allowing his paint to permeate deeply into its fibers, melding his imagery to the medium. With each new layer he adds, Gorzo utilizes surface materiality; it resonates through the plane of his paintings, he says, imparting them with its own visual and tactile disposition.

Tension is at the root of every work by Dumitru Gorzo. Each one is a manifestation of diametrically opposing forces, whether it is dynamism versus solidity, surrealism versus realism, or even outsider versus high art. This tension is apparent in the play between Gorzo’s figuration and abstraction. Both brush and oil stick deliver color, line, and composition with seeming geometric austerity: Sharp corners and edges become faces, but these faces vacillate between pure abstraction and a multitude of emotional expression. Like a jazz improvisation, each new work in this exhibition offers a variation on a theme, and it does so in a gestural lexicon that transcends categorization. The movement radiating from these canvases may, for some, evoke traces of De Kooning, Kippenberger, and even Picasso, all of whom, like Gorzo, found their own path to their art, yet Gorzo thrives amidst the tension between opposing centers of artistic practice and therefore defies the taxonomy of the art world.