“The act of making the paintings is slow, at times methodical. The paint is applied with squeegees and knives, creating thick transparent glazes. The edges of color butt up against each other. There is a physicality to the way the colors meet and edges interlock.”
—Zoe Walsh
Zeit Contemporary Art is pleased to present Remote Light, a selection of new work by Zoe Walsh, marking the artist's first exhibition with the gallery. Curated by Bianca Boragi, the show gathers a new series of vibrant paintings in which Walsh works in cyan, magenta, and yellow glazes, building up planar layers and depth one pass at a time.
Walsh's paintings are an investigation of intermediality: hyper-vivid acrylic surfaces in which refracted screens and translucent, half-legible figures hold each other in place across the canvas. The effect is immersive and a little unsettling, closer to a memory than a picture, replayed and reprojected across the scrim of one's closed eyes. There's a useful comparison to be made to Gerhard Richter's early photo-paintings, though where Richter was reckoning with photography's hold over painting, Walsh is working through something nearer at hand: the screens, filters, and feeds that now shape how desire, queer desire especially, gets seen, staged, and remembered.
This new body of work takes its silhouettes from still photographs shot on the set of Falcon Studios' Ramcharger (1984), now held in the ONE Archives in Los Angeles. The images construct a fantasy of masculine mobility, encounter, and semi-public sex set against an expansive desert landscape, a fantasy Walsh reworks into these dense, layered planes of color.
Walsh's process moves between the digital worlds of SketchUp and Photoshop and the physical work of acrylic painting. The compositions draw on photographic and filmic devices: multiple exposures, image burns, the specific grain of an over- or under-developed frame. Figures thin into ghostly shapes or open into gaps, adding a note of instability to the spatial illusion, and there are moments where the paint simply insists on being paint, one more layer of interference in the whole construction. All of it leaves the viewer standing inside a field of projection, caught somewhere between interior and exterior, in relation to a body that is hybrid and never quite settled.
About the Artist
Zoe Walsh (b. 1989, Washington, D.C.) earned a BA in Art History and the Visual Arts from Occidental College in 2011 and an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University in 2016. During the 2016-17 academic year, they were a Harriet Hale Woolley Fellow at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris, which led to a solo exhibition there in 2017; at Yale, they held the Al Held Travel Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2015). Remote Light marked Walsh's first show with Zeit Contemporary Art. In the years since, their work has appeared in group exhibitions at Night Gallery and the USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, Galerie Ron Mandos in Amsterdam, and UTA Artist Space, alongside solo and two-person exhibitions at M+B Gallery and Vielmetter Los Angeles, and, most recently, Night Fields, their debut solo exhibition in New York, at Yossi Milo Gallery (2025-26). Walsh was a 2019 nominee for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation's Emerging Artist Grant and held residencies at Fountainhead in Miami and Quinn Emanuel in Los Angeles, both in 2024. Walsh lives and works in Los Angeles.
