Zachary Lank: By Lethe, Dreaming

Curated by Will Cotton

April 24 – May 30, 2026

Opening April 24, 2026

The Empty Circle presents By Lethe, Dreaming, a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Zachary Lank, curated by artist Will Cotton. The exhibition explores transcendence, non-duality, and animism, through a rigorous and meticulous painting practice. The exhibition will be on view from April 24 to May 30, 2026.

This new body of work draws inspiration from George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo and Joshua Cutchin’s Ecology of Souls, texts that engage with death, spirituality, and the permeability between states of being. Lank is particularly interested in transcendence and the possibility of moving between worlds, a concept that unfolds across the exhibition through figures that hover between presence and dissolution. Reflecting on his discovery of Lank’s work, Cotton writes: “I came across Zack Lank's work while walking through the studios at the New York Academy of Art in 2023. Zach's paintings are smart, deftly painted, passionate, and unique. But most importantly, his work is unexpected. It defies logic, speaks in poetry, and has a quality that engages on a visceral level that cannot be described in words.”

Beginning with the square, an alchemical symbol of the material realm, Lank constructs compositions that ultimately exceed the boundaries of the visible world. The paintings intentionally destabilize the relationship between viewer and image, presenting encounters with spiritual apparitions that remain unresolved: are these moments of communion or confrontation? Across the exhibition, Lank assumes the role of both painter and conjurer, summoning figures that appear suspended between states, neither fully departed nor entirely present.

Though entirely imagined, the works are grounded in a disciplined, traditional approach to oil painting. Lank begins with preliminary sketches, followed by detailed drawings and color studies, before translating the composition onto canvas. Through this process, the act of painting itself becomes analogous to a kind of invocation, each image unfolding as a gradual emergence from the unseen. The resulting figures carry a sense of autonomy, as if existing beyond the moment of their creation.

The paintings are conceived as encounters with grief, death, and the non-physical, asking where the self ends and the world begins. In works like The Three Bachelors, figures appear more fully formed, while in others like The Goner they dissolve mid-emergence, recalling what Saunders describes as “matter-light-blooming,” a state that suggests the release of ego and attachment within the Bardo. Elsewhere, semi-abstract entities hover ambiguously, suggesting presences that may offer guidance or interruption, their message left open to interpretation.

At the center of the exhibition is The Magician, the first painting created for the series. In the work, colored, viscous smoke rises from a set of empty clothes, recently inhabited and now suspended in place. Two swallows carry strands of this vapor-like soul upward, acting as psychopomps. A hat forms a halo-like disk, though its center remains void, oscillating between absence and generative darkness. The figure’s gesture, one hand pointing upward and the other downward, recalls the Magician of the tarot and the axiom “as above, so below.” The pose suggests both ascent and collapse, a moment of transformation achieved through an internal reconciliation of opposites.

By Lethe, Dreaming situates painting as both image and threshold, a space where perception gives way to something less fixed and more intuitive. Across these works, Lank proposes a world in which boundaries between the physical and spiritual are not stable, but continually in flux.

About the Artist

Zachary Lank is an artist and curator born in Annapolis, Maryland, and now lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute in 2012, and his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2018. In 2022, he was awarded an Elizabeth Greenshields Grant, as well as the Chubb Fellowship Award with NYAA for 2022-23. In 2023 he was given the Henry Clews Award and residency via the La Napoule Art Foundation. Zachary has shown work internationally in art fairs from Denmark’s Art Herning to Hong Kong’s Art Central, as well as curating and exhibiting in New York City with SPRING/BREAK Artshow.His paintings were featured in New American Paintings Northeast Issue #170, and are on permanent view at the Andes Hotel as part of a historical restoration, as documented in HBO/Magnolia’s “In With The Old” program. In January of 2026, his solo show “Sundown’s Sowers” opened at Main Projects in Richmond, VA. He looks forward to sharing new works at The Empty Circle this Spring.