Zio Ziegler Six Trees

Zio Ziegler is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers on the fundamental distillation and reconstruction of forms. Working across multiple modes of expression, his process is organic- each body of work grows, simplifies, and eventually integrates into a larger visual vocabulary. From this evolving universe of symbols, figures, and allegories, a worldview emerges: one that questions norms, probes biological instincts, and plays with notions of space and time.

“Painting is my attempt at processing and synthesizing the stories and information I’ve become curious about,” Ziegler explains. His practice seeks to transform curiosity and experience into flat, transmittable images- building blocks for a broader lexicon. Motifs such as trees, for instance, first arose as visualizations during meditation. Refined through his interest in distillation, they became raw pictographic marks: forms that mirror his internal state while simultaneously symbolizing rebirth, linked to somatic processes.

Working primarily in oil paint, Ziegler creates totemic figures and biological forms whose textured surfaces fuse raw pigment with materials such as sand, soil, and pumice. His influences, though constantly evolving, range from early 20th-century abstraction and Italian Futurism to Jackson Pollock’s experiments of the 1940s. Painted in dynamic whorls of color and gesture, Ziegler’s works nevertheless unfold with deliberate slowness. Their central forms are layered, scraped away, revised, and repainted—gestures that trace both the arc of art history and the unfolding of their own making. With their deeply expressive, tactile presence, the paintings resonate with today’s cultural moment, reflecting a world where the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and digital readymades is provoking an existential crisis not only for artists but for society at large.

Ziegler received his BFA in Fine Art from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2010. His works are included in prestigious museum collections such as the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona; Rubell Museum, Miami; Contemporary Art Foundation, Tokyo; Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, GA; Longlati Foundation, Shanghai; and Colleción Solo, Madrid. Recent solo exhibitions include Reverse Paintings at Almine Rech Brussels (2024); The Essential Figures at Almine Rech New York (2023); The Echo of Picasso, Museo Picasso Malaga, Spain (2023); Art Basel Miami Meridians (2022); The Fourth Wall at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (2018); and Et in Arte Ego at Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy (2014). Ziegler, who is also known internationally for his work as a mural artist, was commissioned by the United Nations for a 70th-anniversary commemorative mural in Oakland, California, US, and has been teaching design history and theory at Stanford University since 2019.