Zachary Lank (b. 1989) received his BFA from Pratt Institute in 2012 and his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2018. He has exhibited across the United States, from Hawaii to New York, and has recently shown his work at Youngblood X Space Gallery St Barth (New York), Spring/Break (New York) and Colganhi (New York). He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Lank conjures a world in which natural rhythms fall out of sync and clash with one another: a danse macabre unfolding across an imaginary Book of Hours. Amid anonymous figures, flashes of colour turn into leaves, branches or petals before dissolving back into the visual tapestry. Irony and dark humour sit side by side with hints of idyll. The toxic intertwines with the bucolic, and Lank’s human characters seem to have mistaken themselves for the lords and owners of nature.

Work and foolishness are central to these compositions, in which ambiguous protagonists confront the landscape in a struggle of futile effort. His scenes recall a medieval aesthetic, yet are disrupted by the presence of vulcanised rubber and gas masks: unsettling emblems of our time. These pseudo-historical tragicomedies of an imagined past point to ecological catastrophe in this decisive present in human history.