Zack Underwood, paintings of young men

My paintings are made as a reaction to my own ambivalence and trepidation relating to the contemporary male’s transition into adulthood. My process centers around taking seemingly mundane found images of young men and putting them into a new context in the form of a collage, which is recreated as a large-scale oil painting. By manipulating the images through cutting and pasting I am able to utilize formal and compositional elements to generate an ambiguous but compelling narrative that addresses my uncertainty about what defines masculinity and adulthood. When these disparate moments are viewed together, there is a communication between the figures, as the line between adult and child is blurred.

Zack Underwood
Mar 15, 2014