Zachary Lank is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. His painting practice explores masculinity, absence, and the spirituality of the everyday, drawing on memory, myth, and classical technique to construct scenes that are at once tender and unsettled. Lank often depicts hollowed figures, disembodied garments, and pastoral landscapes as sites of contemplation, using absence to question inherited social roles and systems of belief.
Lank’s work is rooted in a traditional, layered painting process that includes preparatory sketches, studies, grisaille, and successive veils of color. While informed by grand-manner portraiture, Romantic landscape, and proto-surreal metaphysical painting, his work remains firmly contemporary, engaging American imagery and mythology without nostalgia.
Born in 1989 in Annapolis, Maryland, Lank received his BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, in 2012, and his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2018. He has exhibited internationally in galleries and fairs from Hawaii to Hong Kong, including presentations at Art Basel Miami, Hawk + Hive Gallery, and SPRING/BREAK Art Show. His work has appeared in publications including The Huts Magazine, Artmaze Magazine, and New American Paintings.
Lank grew up spending time on his grandparents’ apple farm in central Virginia, an experience that continues to inform the pastoral and symbolic landscapes in his paintings.