Anna Zorina Gallery is pleased to announce Fetch, Ammon Rost’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition takes its title from the game of fetch, where the seemingly one-sided act of play returns something unexpected: a dog’s joy becomes ours. Rost finds a similar exchange in painting, where color, gesture, and layered surfaces create a sensation that can be felt by another. The exhibition features a new series of works on linen and terracotta vessels.
Rost’s paintings develop through an intuitive process of adding, removing and responding to marks on the canvas. He builds up layers of paint, allowing forms and colors to emerge, overlap, and disappear. Gestural marks sit alongside quieter passages, creating moments of tension and release across the surface. The paintings retain evidence of this process, making visible the decisions, reactions, and changes that happen as the work progresses. There is a sense that Rost is not simply imposing an image onto the canvas, but entering into an ongoing exchange in which each mark results in a new condition that he has to respond to. The power of the finished work comes from this back-and-forth, where intention and chance, control and instinct, continually influence one another.
In Fetch, Rost places Japanese phrases alongside imagery and abstraction on both linen and terracotta vessels. One phrase is のりこえる (norikoeru) which translates as “to overcome”. In Japanese someone will say this when faced with an emotional obstacle. What is untranslatable is the sense of responsibility the phrase evokes: to another fluent speaker, it communicates that a person will ride out a hardship with bravery and come out on the other side. The word functions in a highly poetic manner, requiring no further explanation. Rost was recently struck by the weight of language while writing a song in Japanese. Though he typically sings and writes in English, the experience revealed to him how intentional and acute certain phrases can be in capturing an entire feeling so wholly, an insight now embedded directly in the painted surfaces.
That exchange continues when the paintings meet the viewer. Rost’s abstractions do not offer a fixed image or a singular explanation. Instead, their shifting forms, colors, and gestures create an experience that changes through sustained looking. The work then becomes a space for emotional response and connection. The viewer brings their own attention and experience to the painting, while the painting gives something back through its color, rhythm, and physical presence. Rost is interested in this kind of reciprocity, where the energy put into a work continues to move through it, reaching the viewer and creating something new in the encounter.
Ammon Rost (Born 1980 in Tokyo, Japan) lives and works in New York City. Rost received his BFA in Art from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004. He was a resident at the Silver Art Residency in 2020. Previous solo and group exhibitions include Loyal Gallery, Stockholm; New Image Art, Los Angeles; Sargent’s Daughters, New York City; Wilding Cran, Los Angeles; Mindy Solomon, Miami and the Torrance Museum of Art, Torrance. His largest painting to date was commissioned for the Four Seasons, New York Downtown. The artist has been featured in an interview for Office Magazine.