Born: Kansas City, MO
Current Residence: Berlin, Germany
Zielinski’s images of machines include: laptops, scanners and camcorders. Zielinski paints machines we use daily to communicate to each other with and reminds us that painting is also a form of communication. Zielinski’s paintings have no straight or perfect angles, which is at odds with a conventional machine aesthetic. The wrong angles and wrong proportions of Zielinski’s vibrant machines contribute to a comedy that speaks to how machines appearance change but the functionality has not. The bright colours are both happy and harsh, creating a strange, unsettling and engaging paradox. Most people experience the world mediated by a technological device that is flat and Zielinski’s reverses this by making paintings that are deceptively flat from a distance, but up close are full of relief that seems to grow from the painting out to the viewer. It beckons the viewer to ‘interface’ with painting. Each painting becomes a single event and therefore a single personality. Zielinski uses new advances in acrylic paints: modelling paste, gels and interference colour to update painting. These new acrylics speak to the plastic age we live in. The backgrounds in the paintings look like waves and reference Wi-Fi radio waves and heat dissipation.
Zielinski’s paintings reference still life, portrait and icon painting genres but do not sit squarely in any one category. This mirrors how technologically performs multiple functions. For example: is a camera a phone? Or is the phone a camera-phone or camcorder? Zielinski alludes to the breakdown of traditional nomenclature and the exacerbation of it. Zielinski has created paintings, sculptures and prints that speak to the past, present and future.
His work is in the collections of the Portland Art Museum, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Canberra Museum and Art Gallery, and the National Gallery of Australia and private collections around the globe. His work has been shown in New York City, Los Angeles, Berlin, Tokyo, Sydney and Dubai. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.