Zachari Logan
Wildman and The Bone Garden

From April 4 to May 25, 2024

Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present Wildman and The Bone Garden by Zachari Logan, in collaboration with Paul Petro Contemporary Art.

Wildman and The Bone Garden focuses on Logan's long-standing exploration of queer representation through the rewilding of his own body. This exhibition brings together drawings that mine both art-historical sources and landscape-based observation in the creation of an esoteric queer domain. The Wildman or Wildermann is a character Logan adapts from art historical sources (here in particular from the etchings of Martin Schongauer, German, 1448-1491) as a queerly centered outsider whose representation is a manifestation of human interconnection to the earth.  Logan's representations of flora here incorporate the human as either growing from or blooming in a delicate metamorphosis of botanical forms. These notions of integration are not new, but reinforce Logan's understanding of queerness- of humanness as nature.

As a true human-animal fantastical creature, Logan can gain access to a lost relationship with nature—a communion that bypasses the scientific order. This becomes visible when he deliberately merges human and vegetal forms, as visible in Wildman Puts Wildflowers In His Hair, suggesting a blurring of scientific categories, and unraveling his personal mythology. This demise of the conceptions of species and order allows an unprecedented bio-fluidity to unfold. To access this dimension, Logan deliberately returns to the pre-modern science times of the Renaissance times through the work of artists like Martin Schongauer and Giuseppe Arcimboldo.    

-Giovanni Aloi, Mythical Ecologies & Art.

Canadian artist Zachari Logan (b. Saskatoon, 1980) works mainly with large-scale drawing, ceramics and installation practices, evolving a visual language that explores the intersections between identity, memory and place. Employing a strategy of visual quotation, mined from place and experience, Logan re-wilds his body as a queer embodiment of nature. This narrative shift engages ideas of beauty, mortality, empirical explorations of landscape, and overlapping art-historic motifs that underline a fundamental interconnection of the human as nature.   

Logan has exhibited widely throughout North America, Europe and Asia and is found in private and public collections worldwide, including; National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Remai Modern, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Peabody Essex Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (NMOCA), 21cMuseums Hotel Collection and Thetis Foundation, among others. As an extension of his studio practice, Logan has attended many residencies; including Vienna's Museums Quartier MQ21 Program, the International Studio & Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, Wave Hill Botanical Gardens Winter Workspace Program in the Bronx and Little Bird Artist Residency in rural Bulgaria. Logan was artist in residence at the Tom Thomson Shack at the McMichael Gallery in 2017, a commission of the Ontario Government to commemorate the centenary of Tom Thomson’s death. In 2021 Logan was the Koerner Artist in Residence at Queens University. Logan has worked collaboratively with several celebrated artists, including Ross Bleckner and Sophie Calle and his work has been featured in many publications worldwide, including BBC Culture, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Border Crossings, Huffington Post, Canadian Art and Hyperallergic to name a few. Logan’s recent projects include the 2-person exhibition, Shadow Of The Sun: Ross Bleckner & Zachari Logan, (2021) at Wave Hill Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, Wildflower (2021) a solo exhibition at the Canadian High Commission in London UK, Ghost Meadows, (2021-22) at Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Canada and Remembrance, (2022-23)at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem Massachusetts. Logan’s current exhibition, The Flourishing Edge continues through June 2024 at Toronto’s Gardiner Museum.