Otto Zitko

An ostensible contender for the month's ''My 8-Year-Old Could Do That'' prize is Otto Zitko, a 40-year-old Austrian painter who is having his first exhibition in the United States. Mr. Zitko is one in a line of what might be called sardonic European abstract painters, who trace their lineage, at least in part, back to Sigmar Polke and Martin Kippenberger. But he is also Austrian, which gives him a claim to the hotter, if equally irrational gesturalism of the Viennese Actionists.

Mr. Zitko has had a good time at Cheim and Read, scribbling with abandon, and oilstick, all over the walls of the gallery's big front room, and on several very large aluminum panels in the second room. He alternates between all-black works and those employing close-keyed tones of a single color, like red, blue or green.

Mr. Zitko's scribbles change density, direction and rhythm in ways that suggest concentration and skill, and that give each effort a different spirit and energy. These works may be only a footnote in the long history of all-over abstract painting, but they offer a blithe counterpoint to the literal and intellectual ponderousness of much large-scale art. The longer you look at them, the clearer it is that no 8-year-old and few 40-year-olds could have brought them off.

- Roberta Smith (The New York Times)


"Untitled," 2004, Oilstick on aluminum panel, (59 x 43.25 inches), through Cheim & Read.

The most successful among Zitko's abstract compositions possess an exhilarating, contracting and expanding beat akin to that found in Pollock's classic drip paintings. Like the American pictures, the Viennese artist's drawings originate in virtuosic sweeping gestures that articulate an ambiguous pictorial space with crisscrossing lines and segments of circles and ovals. A large (118 by 87 inches) vertical composition of 1997, executed with two contrasting red oil sticks on a white ground, was the most compelling work on aluminum. The more attenuated lines seem to recede, providing a mesh that visually supports the thicker, meatier lines bundled at rhythmic intervals in the foreground. Here, as with the wall drawing, Zitko evokes the richest, most abstract phase of Action painting with allover drawing that is achieved on a grand scale and fraught with reminiscences of the act of creation.

- Michael Amy (Art in America)


"Untitled," 2006, Oilstick on paper, (78.5 x 59.25 inches), through Cheim & Read.