Main Projects is pleased to present Sundown’s Sowers, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Zachary Lank. Working at the intersection of figurative painting, landscape, and allegory, Lank constructs scenes that meditate on masculinity, spirituality, and the uneasy inheritance of American myth. This exhibition marks his first solo presentation with the gallery.
Across these works, Lank stages figures that are simultaneously present and absent: disembodied garments, hollowed forms, and costumed remnants that stand in for the body itself. Set within tenderly rendered landscapes - orchards, fields, and wooded expanses that stretch beneath racing skies - these figures appear suspended in states of rest, collapse, or reverie. The settings recall Romantic and Hudson River School traditions, yet their mood is quieter, more unsettled. What might once have read as symbols of self-sufficiency or conquest now slump into reflective torpor.
To sow at sundown, as Lank suggests, is to labor in uncertainty - a condition shared by his hollowed figures, who persist in gesture and ritual even as the body recedes.
Lank describes these emptied forms as “archetypal containers for contradictions.” On one hand, they point to the hollowness of social performance - the cosplay of masculinity so pervasive in American culture. On the other, they gesture toward a kind of spiritual dispersal: a shedding of the body and a tentative reaching toward something beyond it. The paintings hover between these readings without resolving them, allowing absence itself to become expressive.
Formally, Lank’s practice draws from grand-manner portraiture, proto-surreal metaphysical painting, and contemporary figurative sensibilities. His surfaces are built through a traditional, layered process - sketches, studies, grisaille, and successive veils of color - yet the resulting images feel improvisational and inward, as if assembled from memory rather than observation. Americana is present, but it plays less like nostalgia than like a nocturne: hushed, melancholic, and lightly haunted.
In Sundown’s Sowers, the landscape becomes both stage and witness. Trees arc skyward, fields recede into distance, and light gathers at dusk - not as an ending, but as a moment of suspension. What remains are traces: garments without bodies, gestures without actors, and the quiet persistence of questions that have long animated painting itself. What are we, and how ought we be in the world?