Christopher Zanko
Christopher Zanko
Past communities, settings, and homes have always faced change driven by powerful exogenous forces: social, economic, political, technological, environmental and aesthetic. Adaptation to these demands has led to removal, replacement, renovation, and a preoccupation with new fads and fashions, some for good some for bad. The original fades or disappears as do individual and collective memories.
By contrast, Illawarra artist Christopher Zanko has directed his gaze to look back at the original in our communities, to capture and record the settings and dwellings of mid-twentieth century suburban homes. Those homes with humble, noble bones and those with greater possibilities. Christopher celebrates these through the duality of printmaking and painting. He locates his subjects, their settings, and world through wood-carved expression suffused with the play of colour and shade reminding the viewer of the past.
Christopher Zanko graduated with a Bachelor of Creative Arts from Wollongong University (Distinction in Painting). He was a 2020 finalist in the Brett Whiteley Scholarship, a 2019 finalist in the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Still Life Award at Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery. He was a finalist of the 2018 and 2016 Gosford Art Prize and the 2015 Lloyd Rees Memorial Youth Art Award. He has exhibited in a number of group exhibitions including at Sydney Contemporary (2020), as well as the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Project Contemporary Art Space in Wollongong. In 2017 he was invited to participate in Art Box Projects' Japanese residency in Tokyo. His work is held in the University of Wollongong collection, Wollongong Art Gallery collection and in private collections in Australia.
