Christopher Zmijewski
Artist
About
Christopher Zmijewski
Born in Buffalo, NY
Lives & works in Cherry Hill New Jersey
I
Chris Zmijewski’s realist oil paintings depict urban and landscape scenes. He often paints on a large, almost life size canvas. While his work touches many aspects of photorealism, his point of view is not that of a photo realist, but rather that of a painterly realist. In describing his work, the New Art Examiner, wrote, “. . . [his] paintings of the Philadelphia cityscape, accurately rendered with cool detachment, but with occasional areas of thick, sensuous paint that seem at odds with the artist’s camera-like remove from his subject matter. . . Like Hopper, Zmijewski attempts to express urban loneliness.”
Zmijewski’s work, having been compared to that of Estes, has been dominating the Philadelphia scene for years. His strong vertical compositional devices in the form of traffic lights and street signs seem to bring control and order to the chaos of city life His style of painting, which has gained him much acclaim in this area, exemplifies a mastery of capturing cityscapes with warm painterly realism.. Zmijewski’s painting has always been purely about the physical act of painting — how paint slides on the canvas, paper, wood — the act of painting. His strong vertical compositional devices bring control and order to the chaos of city life.
Spending extensive time in France painting over the years, he has conducted painting excursions of the impressionist countryside in and around Paris, where he has become the liaison to the En Plein Air School of Painting in Paris. Those paintings painted en plein air while in France, show the simplistic style which can only be captured with this technique which involves observation, simplifying, composition, clean colors, atmospheric perspective and outdoor composition.
Capturing the tranquility of the virgin snow, Zmijewski has combined the use of thick, sensuous paint against a background of stark beauty to create scenes of frigid serenity.
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BORN Buffalo, New York: 1958
EDUCATION BFA, University of Pennsylvania, 1983
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1980
AWARDS/
SCHOLARSHIPS J. Henry Schiedt Memorial Traveling Scholarship, PAFA, 1980
Edna Pennypacker Stauffer Memorial, PAFA, 1979
First Place, Adam Styka Memorial, 1975
Grant, NJ State Council on the Arts, 1983
Senate and General Assembly of the State of NJ, 1999, Applause Award as Outstanding Contributing Artist
EXHIBITIONS 1980, Current Representational Painting in
Philadelphia, Federal Courthouse, Philadelphia and Gross-McCleaf Gallery
1981, Exhibition – On the Road, Gross-McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia
1983, Healing Process Through Art, N.J. State Council on the Arts
1985, Six Realist Painters, Gross-McCleaf
Gallery, Philadelphia
1980-2003, Consecutive One-Man Exhibition of Work, Gross-McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
1991, Realism Painting—The Ultimate Illusion, Abington Art Center and Glassboro State College
1996, Galerie CHABIN, 4 et 6, rue du Mont-Denis, Paris, France
1998, Through the Heart of the City, Phila. Art
Alliance, Phila.,PA
2001, City Hall at 100, Art in City Hall, Philadelphia
2004, Philadelphia, Gross-McCleaf Gallery
COLLECTIONS Fidelity Bank; Ballard, Spahr, Andrews & Ingersoll; Continental Bank; CIGNA Collection; Burlington County Memorial Hospital; Provident Bank; Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania; Spector Gadon & Rosen, P.C.; Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen; Jack Kellmer Company; Vollmer Associates; Federal Reserve Bank; United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania; The Union League of Philadelphia (sculpture of General Alexander M. Haig, Jr. in permanent collection); many other corporate and private collections.