Zombie Formalism: an autopsy

Zombie Formalism is a prime example of the art market’s potential to echo boom-and-bust trading on the stock market. Ten years ago, a group of artists – predominantly male, abstract painters – speedily rose to prominence and saw the market value of their works rapidly reach dizzying heights. Just a few auction seasons later, these same artists saw spectacular falls at the same houses. So, one decade on, what is the legacy of Zombie Formalism? What are these artists doing now?

Recap: what was Zombie Formalism?

The term germinated in a 2014 article by painter and critic Walter Robinson for Artspace that observed how a generation of artists were making largely abstract work visually recalling modernist paintings like abstractions by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline or Frank Stella (hence, zombie).

A generation of artists were creating, as Robinson suggested, novelty forms of abstraction based on either new painting techniques or elaborate concepts for creating such works. “Zombie Formalism,” he said, “gives us a series of artificial milestones, such as the first-ever painting made with the electroplating process (Jacob Kassay) [or] the first-ever painting done using paint applied in a fire extinguisher (Lucien Smith).” Robinson continued that such works hold a “chic strangeness, a mysterious drama, a meditative calm” that “function well in the realm of high-end, hyper-contemporary interior design”. Works in this realm were also described in exhibition texts with curatorial buzzwords such as Process-based Abstraction, Neo-Modernism, Post-internet, etc…

Writing in Vulture, critic Jerry Saltz asked: “Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?” in a viral article that included six collages of similar-looking paintings (see image). Both writers implied that some artists were purposefully making work that might be activated by a market hankering for a new trend: safe, striking, cool and easy to acquire and sell. Artists like Parker Ito, Lucien Smith, Jacob Kassay, Ethan Cook, Angel Otero, Tauba Auerbach, Israel Lund, David Ostrowski, Oscar Murillo, Mark Flood, Hugh Scott-Douglas and Alex Israel were all circumstantially lumped into this Zombie Formalist ‘movement’ despite having no shared sensibility or avenues of exploration in their practice beyond a kind of shared ‘conceptual abstraction’ that became a dominating market trend. As such, collectors scrambled to acquire their works and their gallery exhibitions were often sellouts with long waiting lists.

“For a couple of years there was an article that came out every week about Zombie Formalism and it really seemed to transcend the art world,” says Parker Ito, who saw huge financial success in the early years of this ‘movement’. “Everyone was talking about it. I think it warped my idea of success, chiefly because it was overnight financial success. I made ten times more money in 2013 than 2014. So, when I was in the middle of it, I just thought ‘Oh, this is what being a professional artist is like: you have a show, it sells out before the opening and you think that’s normal’. But no. It sounds really naive. That’s not normal at all.’”

Paintings by these artists quickly appeared at auction and were flipped for astronomical prices. The examples are abundant. In 2013, Lucien Smith’s first work to come to auction sold for $389,000 at Phillips to collector and trader Alberto Mugrabi, who, just two years later, claimed the work was unsellable – the artist’s auction prices had dropped from hundreds of thousands to figures 85% lower. Similarly, art collector and dealer Niels Kantor paid $100,000 for a work by Hugh Scott-Douglas in 2014, returning it to the market two years later for 80% less than he paid. It was a similar story with other artists including Dan Rees, Christian Rosa and Parker Ito, who all went from receiving high auction prices with competitive bidding to having their works just reach their low auction estimate, or fail to sell entirely. Unsurprisingly, notorious collectors like Inigo Philbrick and Stefan Simchowitz were heavily involved in trading works by artists lumped into this group – although Simchowitz (somewhat controversially) does claim that auctions can aid the market growth of artists.

Many journalists reported on this dramatic financial oscillation. Sceptical critics talked about how the topline drama and excitement of the market impact which artists lead the critical conversation. Despite having legitimate, original and individual pathways in their thinking, it was easier for critics to focus predominantly on the trend over each artist’s unique practice. Artist and writer Allan Gardner observed in Mousse that, increasingly, the legacy of an artist’s practice often appears to be defined solely on their decline in market value, not the unique qualities of their ideas and physical works. “With this in mind, progress will come not from decrying the market but from ignoring it,” Gardner says.

“People were so hyper-fixated on this because it’s attached to this moment in the market, but actually, my practice [and some of the others] was much more expansive. I wasn’t even making abstract paintings when all this shit was happening” continues Ito. “You have to make a specific kind of work to even be considered for that kind of market trajectory – primarily, painting. I found a lot of the Zombie Formalism work was bad. There were definitely good artists but I thought a lot of it was garbage.”

Ito reflects on how formal art education ignores teaching students about handling the market. “It might be different now, but when I was in art school, they taught us nothing about being a professional artist”, he says. “Mostly because the faculty were all failed artists so they didn’t have much real-world experience.”

“I was very young. It warped my brain in a lot of ways,” he continues. “Of course you want people to know and care about the things you do, but it becomes only about the speculative side. You see these things discarded, it’s not a good feeling. My psyche has definitely been heavily affected by that period. It was so rapid, I really had to learn as I went along. At the time I don’t think I realised how unnatural it was. Most artists don’t experience something like that. Now, you have speculative bubbles. It’s a much more common thing for younger artists – it’s speculative bubble after speculative bubble.”

The legacy of Zombie Formalism

The phenomenon of Zombie Formalism raises important questions about the ethics of ‘pumping and dumping’ artists’ markets solely for quick financial gains, without considering the negative consequences this may have on the artist’s personal life and career.

That said, it does appear that most of the key artists associated with Zombie Formalism still hold active careers and are making art, despite being subjected to rollercoaster markets. But lots has changed in ten years, and in today’s climate, we are perhaps unlikely to see a group of predominantly white men hyped in this way (unless, perhaps, in the NFT world – which operates somewhere between contemporary art and cryptomania).

Over the past decade, many artists have been thrown into the commercial deep end – sell-out shows, auction records, and representation with mid-sized or blue-chip galleries at a young age – with little to no real critical (or institutional) conversation surrounding their practices. Since the pandemic, this has exacerbated – not least, because criticism itself is under threat as magazines fold and an increasing amount of content is sponsored. Notable recent trends have included luminous and psychedelic landscapes and vistas; figurative identity-led painting by Black artists; rusty painting and female abstraction; overlooked surrealist artists; and outsider abstraction, indigenous, aboriginal and folk art – which had a large presence in this year’s Venice Biennale. As an anonymous writer humorously puts it in a letter to the blog The Painter’s Keys:

“Zombie Formalism is composting; and morphing into other zombies: zombie illustrative figuration, zombie fifth-wave nudes, zombie instagram content creator art, zombie neo-puerilism, zombie neo-super realism, zombie neo-brutalism, zombie neo-primitivism, zombie performative process art, zombie thirst-trap, zombie blue-chip clones, zombie regurgitated fashion-celebrity-pop, zombie upcycle, zombie collage, zombie-gift-shop-as-museum-survey…”

A recent New York Times investigation revealed how, in 2024, art sales have slumped and the market for young artists has “lost nearly a third of its value”, perhaps the result of “high interest rates and inflation” and a general sense of “hesitation” among collectors. For example, a work by Emmanuel Taku “sold at auction in 2021 for $189,000. When [the same work] was put up for auction again [in 2024], its price plunged to just $10,160.” The article seems to mirror many of the think pieces around Zombie Formalism, but also observes that such trend cycles (i.e. how long certain artists/movements remain en vogue) are becoming shorter and shorter.

Critic and curator Kenny Schachter, who covered Zombie Formalism regularly in columns for Artnet, shared his thoughts with me about the current state of affairs: “From the formulaic formalism of the zombies, we’ve since stumbled sideways (at best) to a period that is even duller and more conservative. Characterised by a play-it-safe sense of artistic caution, I’d term these works mundane money-ism. The paintings – pigment and canvas continue to rule the roost – of the last 3-5 years fall back on the tried and true: simple figuration with shards of abstraction and generic, easy-on-the-eye abstraction in bright hues. Digital art held a brief glimmer of hope in the form of NFTs, offering potential access without gatekeepers, but the window was slammed shut just as swiftly by the familiar forces of crime and greed. A few words of friendly advice – both buyers AND sellers had better beware.”

At the height of Zombie Formalism discourse, Jerry Saltz predicted: “My guess is that, if and when money disappears from the art market again, the bottom will fall out of this genericism. Everyone will instantly stop making the sort of painting that was an answer to a question that no one remembers asking – and it will never be talked about again.” If we trust Saltz’s prophecy, are we once again due an exciting new generation of artists? I’m not so confident. In London, studios are harder to find and sustain, art colleges are evolving into factories with more students and less teaching time (and still, little education on the practicalities of surviving the market), and galleries are less able to take risks due to increasing rents and hesitant collectors. Could a more realistic prediction be that we are retreating into a more elitist, less ambitious and, dare I say, zombied-out version of the art world?

What are the Zombie Formalists doing now?

Artists associated with ZF have fared differently. Some now work with blue-chip galleries, others have forged new creative directions working with the new generation of galleries, while some abandoned the gallery system altogether, and some, even stranger paths.

One of the few female artists associated with ZF, Tauba Auerbach – known for her rippling ‘fold’ paintings holding the illusion of three-dimensionality – now works with Paula Cooper and Standard (Oslo) galleries. In 2021, she received a major solo exhibition at SFMoMA in San Francisco.

Joe Bradley has moved between galleries. In 2015, he left Gavin Brown for Gagosian, where he stayed for six years before moving to Petzel Gallery, Xavier Hufkens, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber in 2021. But two years into the relationship, he ditched Petzel for blue chip David Zwirner.

Oscar Murillo is working with his long standing gallery Carlos Ishikawa and also shows with blue-chip galleries Gagosian and David Zwirner. Murillo is currently occupying Tate Modern’s Turbine hall with a large-scale participatory installation, alongside pursuing explorations in new technologies, like artificial intelligence.

Perhaps most dramatically, Christian Rosa – who in 2015 was showing in White Cube’s short-lived São Paulo gallery and receiving Artforum reviews – has recently been indicted for allegedly selling forgeries of his former mentor Raymond Pettibon’s iconic wave paintings. Despite “fleeing” from the USA in 2021, Rosa is still making versions of his own abstract works, which he has been posting to his 97,000 followers on Instagram.

Last year, Parker Ito received a two-person exhibition with Jon Rafman titled ‘Poets, Gamblers, Fools’ at Lubov, New York. This autumn, he’ll have a solo exhibition at Rose Easton in London. “I’m turning the whole gallery into a Camera Obscura”, he says. On view will be a soundwork, modified flatbed scanner sculpture, and paintings made with an inkjet printer and hand-applied elements.

In 2015, after much speculation, Lucien Smith decided to ditch working with commercial galleries because they couldn’t get him a museum show. In 2020, he secured a show at The Parrish Museum, Long Island by privately inviting curators to see his work installed in a Queens warehouse. Smith also founded Serving The People, a project developing emerging talent in art, music and film, which aims to “bring awareness to the unrefined, uncommercial and create a market for it”, With a substantial digital following, the group facilitates physical events worldwide. Smith also now sells work direct to clients from his website via auction, and is opening FOOD, a restaurant in New York which also provides a platform for creatives.

Mark Flood is known for making droll and sardonic text paintings reflecting on American consumerism and economics, such as reading phrases like ‘Market Correction’. He is represented by KARMA, Peres Projects and Modern Art and recently received a solo exhibition at Elliott Templeton Fine Arts, Jack Pierson’s achingly cool project space in New York’s Chinatown.

Jacob Kassay received a solo museum exhibition in 2017 at the Albright Knox Art Gallery, New York and is still exhibiting widely. Earlier this year, he received a solo show at Galerie Art Concept in Paris, where he debuted new animal sculptures. Later this year, an extension of this exhibition was staged in a Brooklyn Heights apartment (which seems to enforce a trend in both NYC and London for apartment exhibitions post-pandemic).

For the last four years, Hugh Scott-Douglas took a break from showing work. This year, he exhibited in a London group exhibition curated by Lawrence Van Hagen on the upper floor of a residential block in Mayfair. He is represented by Croy Nielsen, BLUM, Gallery Baton and Jessica Silverman.

 

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