About the artist:

Active in New York in the 1980s, Dorothy Zilka made a name for herself by using irregular shapes to create abstract artworks filled with motion. From Art in America, May 1985 by Lawrence Campbell --- Her brilliantly inventive multilayered torn paper paintings are impressions as well as expressions of panoramic viewpoints of disorder, billboards, garbage, ruined houses - mobile visions as if seen from an automobile traveling rapidly along an elevated highway. Somtimes it is the sea she rushes by with masts of boats showing above the coping bordering the highway. The views and visual events that she passes seem to vanish so quickly that we are unable to give names to most of them. Zilka expresses what David Hockney has called "the pictorial flow" a portrayal of perceptual experiences that bypasses the narrow zone of classical perspective. Zilka's solution to the difficulty of doing this is not a retatement of Futurism, but an assembling of different layers of space and time together. We feel we are inside the experience of the painting, not merely looking at it from the outside. Zilka paints with oil sticks and acrylics and sometimes with oil paint, on the paper she has wet and "roughed up." Then she scratches the fevered surfaces with pencil, makes warts of paint, builds and assembles, and affixes torn-up papers. Her paintings cannot be framed. They hang free and for the most part have an unusual shape, with the upper section smaller than the lower, which stretches out sideways- as though she were faced with the problem of painting a mural to ft into an oddly shaped architectural setting. --- From the New York Times, Jan 1985 by Grace Glueck Dorothy Zilka in her gernearlized landscapes, made with oil or acrylic on paper and partly inspired by the New Jersey coast, Dorothy Zilka builds up wonderful surface "skins" with heavily worked paint and collage material. The views themselves are long horizontal readings that typically make use of a straight road as divider, with a good deal of turbulence in the sky and on land the suggestions of trees bridges, houses, as we saa lonely, unfrequented stretches. They are small works, but full of painterly felicities and feeling for light and space.