Zev Segal (b. 1954 Vilnius, Lithuania) is an American artist living and working in Northern New Jersey. His artistic explorations, chiefly through paint, span over forty years.
After graduating from Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School in 1980, Segal enrolled in the Bezalel Art Academy’s Photography department. Finding the camera’s dissection of the observable world into compelling fragments better suited as a point of departure than a stopping point, he later switched to painting, captivated by the medium’s total freedom from predetermined outcomes.
Segal’s paintings appear to dance exuberantly down an ever-shifting divide between figuration and abstraction, reflecting the artist’s dual fascination with the observational and theoretical realms. They revel in endless layering and juxtaposition of images and concepts mined from nature, mathematics, science, philosophy, and Art History, with new motifs springing from the artist’s own previous distillations of forms and ideas.
Each painting’s surface is often characterized by a gradual fusion of visual strata and threads in increased densities and focal points, organically giving rise to a variety of compositional elements akin to knots, clusters, and densifications anchoring the visual field. The material interaction of these layers, in turn, creates a prismatic effect leading to Segal’s wholly unique artistic vision.