Zachary Armstrong: “Entrance”

Entrance is pleased to present “Entrance”, a solo exhibition of new work by Zachary Armstrong, featuring a series of encaustic paintings installed within a site-specific intervention by Armstrong on the gallery’s ground level. The exhibition marks Armstrong's first presentation with the gallery, shown alongside a selection of new work by Jackson Maximo Armstrong, Zachary Armstrong’s son, in the gallery’s lower level. When Entrance was refurbished in 2021 the gallery underwent significant cosmetic changes, however, the original floors were preserved. Though uncommon in a gallery setting, the orange glazed tile is ubiquitous in any commercial kitchen or seafood processing facility in the Lower East Side and Chinatown. As part of the ambitious site-specific installation, Armstrong meticulously reconstructed the tiles using his signature encaustic technique. Moving and expanding the floor to the wall, the encaustic tiles are juxtaposed with hand-fabricated wood wainscoting and shelving, accompanying a series of eight new encaustic paintings. The installation acts as a backdrop for the abstract paintings, the smallest works of his career, now occupying Entrance’s rebuilt space. Armstrong’s previous work centers around motifs of barnyard animals, engines, fish and other fragments drawn from Americana. His iconography always gravitates toward objects chosen for their capacity to "pack" form, color, and meaning into a single image. The gallery’s signature tile floors fit seamlessly into Armstrong’s practice; the orange tile carries its own weight through connotations of labor, culture, place, and the layered histories of a neighborhood remade across generations. Encaustic is among the oldest painting mediums in recorded history, practiced by ancient Greek and Egyptian artists and employed in the Fayum portrait tradition before receding almost entirely from Western painting for centuries. Its contemporary revival remains seldom. Jasper Johns returned to it in the 1950s, and Armstrong notes the comparison directly: "His are much clearer than mine, more transparent." Where encaustic typically exploits the translucency of beeswax, Armstrong works against the material's default, building with heavier, more opaque applications of color. He sources two thousand pounds of beeswax annually from a local farm in Ohio where he lives and works. Armstrong mixes it with damar resin and oil paint at ratios well beyond conventional recipes. The result is a surface closer to clay than to glass, thick globular marks that accumulate and fuse under heat into something palpably dense and pressurized. The paintings in the exhibition represent a new departure for the artist. Armstrong began this body of abstract work by redrawing a sketch his brother made of him in childhood, working the image through a process he describes as increasingly free and evolved. For years Armstrong’s practice remained disciplined, regimented, and bound to figuration. "It's actually something new. I never allow myself any of that freedom,” Armstrong said of his recent works, "it cracked a code.” Rhubarb pink and sky gray marks accumulated across the canvases until the paintings began resolving on their own terms. He references Monet's 25 Haystack paintings when discussing his process: the same subject returned across changing conditions of light, time, and material, each iteration distinct– the series itself the argument. Armstrong questions if there is a contradiction between repetition and abstraction, "Is it even abstract," he asks, "if I'm painting it over and over again?"