Domenico Zindato

b. 1966, Italian

Tags: Drawing, Painting

Born in the southern Italian province of Reggio Calabria, Domenico Zindato has traveled widely. He studied law and then theater design and cinema in Rome. He lived in Milan before moving in 1988 to Berlin, where he worked as a party organizer in nightclubs. He traveled to India and Mexico, living in Bombay and then in Mexico City, finally settling in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he has lived since 1996.

The warm, vibrant colors in his works recall the natural features of Mexico. His color combinations may be attributed to the decorative arts Zindato saw while traveling in India. Made with pastel and ink applied with fine-haired brushes and nib pens on homemade paper, these richly detailed works range in size from less than eight inches to over three feet across. While the dimensions of Zindato’s works have grown, the scale of his figures and abstract patterns remains the same. He spends three months working six to eight hours a day on each of these larger works. His imagery often includes iconic human figures and body parts, birds, snakes, letters, organic shapes, and fine-lined and decorative patterns.

In 1997 Zindato sat with Attila Richard Lukacs, a Canadian painter he had met in Berlin, on the doorstep of Phyllis Kind’s gallery in New York until she agreed to look at Zindato’s portfolio. Kind presented concurrent solo exhibitions of works by the two artists in the spring of 2000. His work was shown at Phyllis Kind Gallery again in 2004 and 2007 and at the American Folk Art Museum in 2010.