VICTORI + MO is pleased to announce Ad Astra by New York-based artist Frank Zadlo. Ad Astra presents three new series of works. The exhibition, which marks his second solo exhibition at the gallery, opens June 27 and will remain on view through August 18, 2019. There will be an opening for Ad Astra on June 27 from 6 to 8pm.

For almost ten years Zadlo has been inspired by the material variability of concrete, and his practice highlights its transformational and dynamic properties. For this exhibition he has shifted from his past works which focused on landscapes and pulled inspiration from sidewalks to reference moonscapes. Despite the change in subject matter, Zadlo continues to use concrete to explore surface tension, distortion, and flattened perspective.

The series Moonscapes references the history of landscape painting, perspective, and objecthood. Instead of a traditional horizon line, his Moonscapes have a vertical perspective and challenges the viewer to different vantage points. Made of hand-dyed indigo linen, concrete, and silicon carbon, a material used in sidewalks, the resulting work is part canvas and part sculptural vessel with concrete pours in suspended animation that looks as if they are images of the moon’s surface viewed from a spaceship. These paintings are full of kinetic possibilities when activated by the viewer’s willingness to continually change perspectives.

For his Flat Screen sculptures, Zadlo pours wet concrete into his television screens, forcing material transmutations with satisfying optical effect. The screens also serve as pictorial windows and visual metaphors for humanity’s growing disconnection to a natural horizon line, creating disorienting and quietly compelling works that appear both otherworldly and sublime.

The exhibition is bookended with two related works, a sculpture made of three blocks of broken concrete resting on each other on a hand truck in the front room and brightly colored powder coated steel sculptures in the backyard that take on the same shape. These works build on themes of perceptual experience and act as a start and endpoint as one transitions through the gallery.