Athos Zacharias

Oil Painting

American, b. 1927

Painter Athos Zacharias creates dynamic works notable for their spontaneity and characterized by Art News as “blindingly original.” Now the one-time assistant to Willem de Kooning has produced a new group of paintings uniting his major ideas as a “between generational painter”. “My work resides in the present.I allow a great deal of the world into my awareness. I make beautiful accidents and then refine them. Working in silence evokes energy and movement, shape and color, so that the entire painting can be seen in a single glance.

“For me it is always about surprise: the element of the new. I paint spontaneously abandoning myself to the gesture until the personality of the painting asserts itself and I must stop. References to reality appear, but the subject of the painting is always my own imagination.I remain a disciple of Abstract Expressionism, sometimes referred to as Action Painting. The act of painting is the path to my most vital self.”

His paintings can be found in important collections including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Museum of Art, Providence, RI; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MI; The Kalamazoo Institute of Art, Kalamazoo, MI; The Butler Art Institute, Youngstown, OH; E.F.Hutton & Co., NY; and The Westinghouse Corporation, Pittsburgh,PA.

Mr. Zacharias has exhibited in leading galleries in major American cities including New York and the Hamptons, as well internationally; notably in Amsterdam and Japan. Athos Zacharias was born in Marlborough, MA in 1927 and raised in Fall River, MA. He earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1952, on the GI Bill, and an MFA in 1953 from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. He died of kidney failure August 2019 in East Hampton, NY, at age 92