Robert Zehnder

Robert Zehnder conjures surreal, expansive landscapes that operate both as emotional terrain and psychological cartographies. Rejecting inhabited spaces, he constructs top-down views: layered vignettes that interlock and drift, creating environments that feel familiar yet uncanny. His richly textured canvases begin with a drawing phase—acting as map‑making—where pathways and geographic nodes unfold top-down. From there he applies layers of oil, allowing colors to communicate mood and motion. The resulting scenes hover between topographical detail and mooded abstraction, often suggesting ruptures, false bottoms, and precarious vistas. Influenced by American Regionalism and surrealism, Zehnder synthesizes pastoral ambiances with disquieting emptiness. His landscapes echo the anxiety and instability of contemporary life—fields that seem to move, maps that might slip out from under you, terrain in flux. Zehnder is attentive to the slippage between constructed and imagined space: his worlds feel both designed and dreamlike. His work invites viewers to wander uncertain terrain—spaces that reflect myth, solitude, anxiety, and renewal. It is this sense of narrative dissolved into visual form that defines his compelling visual practice, where meaning is never fixed, but always in flux. ...

C L E A R I N G is a contemporary art gallery based in New York, Los Angeles and Brussels. The gallery was founded in 2011, with the focus of showing emerging art. It now represents over 20 living artists, providing many of them - such as Harold Ancart, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Chase Hall, Calvin Marcus and Marina Pinsky - with their first gallery exhibition. The gallery also represents the estates of Eduardo Paolozzi, Bruno Gironcoli and René Heyvaert. C L E A R I N G supports its artists by producing works, exhibitions and books, as well as working closely with public and private institutions. ...