Jeffrey Isaac
Jeffrey Isaac is a painter and video artist. His style often uses photorealism as a means to a conceptual inquiry of fantastical content with an absurdist approach.
He also uses several pseudonyms including Prof. Dr. Dr. Zagreus Bowery, publisher of the so-called "world's smallest magazine of its kind" Public Illumination Magazine.
Art
Isaac has exhibited widely across the US and Europe. His work incorporates a range of media, from digital art to oil on canvas; he is particularly known for his installations, often incorporatingsound and performance as well as panoramas and dioramic cabinets.
In 2016 he created a major installation, titled 'Earthly Delights' of large-scale cut-out paintings, suspended in a re-purposed church, with a concurrent performance by Nyla van Ingen, Myriam Laplante, Daniela Malusardi and Dan Kinzelman.
His exhibition 'Manifest Destinies' at Cà Zanardi, Venice, was part of an ambitious series of multi-site collateral shows of the 53rd Venice Biennale "Detournement Venise 2009", in a 2-story former cookie factory. It included monumental history paintings such as "Flotilla of Fools" depicting all 196 heads of state, wearing fool's hats, posing on shipwrecks.
He created the animation for the 2007 performance of ‘Il Corvo’ by the La Mama Experimental Theater Company at the 38th Biennale Teatro in Venice.
In 1993 he had a solo exhibition at Galleria Marilena Bonomo in Bari, titled '93 Olives' and in 1994 a solo show at Salvatore Ala Gallery in Soho, NYC titled ‘Subway to Italy’.
At the 1990 Spoleto Festival in Italy, he presented a 350° walk-in panorama of the Umbrian village Bazzano Superiore. It was installed in the geodesic dome in Spoleto known as the Spoletosfera, designed by Buckminster Fuller.
With public funding from NYSCA, Isaac curated a series of exhibitions in a storefront gallery in Lower Manhattan named Public Illumination Picture Gallery. The two-year program included work by David Wojnarowicz, Mimi Gross, Christian Marclay, Barbara Ess and Rudy Burckhardt amongst others. For the final exhibition he created an interactive multi-media installation titled 'Exhibition in a maze'.
Publishing
In 1984 his book "Twelve Picturesque Passions" was sponsored by Printed Matter, Inc, partially funded by a LINE grant. It was at this time that he met the American artist Sol LeWitt, one of the co-founders of Printed Matter, who later became a friend and neighbor. In 2017 an exhibition about Isaac's relationship with LeWitt was staged at the Chelsea College of Arts Library titled "Exchanges between Sol LeWitt and Jeffrey Isaac in Spoleto, Italy, and New York and Chester, Connecticut USA". It was curated by Jo Melvin, Reader in Fine Art, Archives and Special Collections at Chelsea College of Art.Since 1979 Isaac has published an artists' periodical, notable for its tiny size, called Public Illumination Magazine. Each issue has a unique theme with contributions by numerous artists using pseudonyms.
Through 2017, sixty issues have been published. It is included in the collections of the New York Public Library, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Pompidou Center, Paris, and others.
Life
Born in the US, he spent his childhood in Switzerland before moving back to the United States where he studied painting at Rhode Island School of Design and at Camberwell School of Art in London. In 1977 he moved to NYC where his activities expanded to publishing, performance art and curating. In 1979 he developed the format for and co-managed the performance series Avant-Garde-Arama at the venue Performance Space 122. Under the alias Eddie Grand he performed in the art-rock band “Listen to the Animal” with Barbara Ess, Judith Wong and Al Arthur, at venues such as CBGB, the Mudd Club and The Public Theater.In 1986 he moved to Umbria near the town of Spoleto, befriending artists Sol LeWitt, Carol and Michael Venezia, Afranio Metelli, Robin Heidi Kennedy, Marco Tirelli, Myriam Laplante, Franco Troiani, Emanuele de Donno and Nyla van Ingen.
During the period from 1999 to 2006, he produced a series of video animations featuring skeletons, saints and devils.
In 2004, a minor scandal surrounded a banner he had painted at the invitation of the town of Foligno for a historical pageant depicting the patron saint San Feliciano naked on horseback.