Zolla/Lieberman Gallery is pleased to present New Paintings, an exhibition of recent works by David Kroll. Known for his meticulously rendered still lifes and imagined landscapes, Kroll creates compositions that explore the complex relationship between humanity and the natural world.

The traditions of Dutch still-life painting and nineteenth-century Romanticism inform Kroll’s work. Birds, fish, delicate eggs, and decorative porcelain vessels inhabit carefully constructed environments that suggest moments suspended in time. Beneath their apparent tranquility lies a subtle tension between nature and human intervention.

Kroll builds his paintings through successive layers of paint, resulting in luminous surfaces distinguished by subtle tonal variations and meticulous attention to detail. His compositions derive their complexity from contrasts between light and shadow, movement and stillness, and the organic and manufactured.

Central to Kroll’s practice is the idea of painting as a place of refuge. His work reflects a longing for a natural world from which contemporary life has become increasingly removed. Through their quiet beauty and subtle ambiguity, these paintings offer spaces for reflection.

David Kroll is an American painter whose work is widely recognized for its meticulous attention to detail, atmospheric landscapes, and carefully constructed still lifes. For more than four decades, Kroll has developed a distinctive visual language informed by the traditions of Renaissance and Baroque painting and nineteenth-century Romanticism. His compositions combine precise representations of the natural world with imagined environments, creating contemplative scenes that explore the complex relationship between humanity and nature.

Kroll’s paintings frequently feature birds, fish, delicate eggs, fruit, and decorative ceramic vessels arranged against expansive landscapes and atmospheric skies. These elements occupy carefully constructed settings in which familiar objects take on unexpected relationships, blurring the boundaries between observation and imagination. Through meticulous rendering and subtle variations, Kroll creates dreamlike environments that evoke solitude and tranquility.

Born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1956, Kroll grew up in LaPorte, Indiana, where his early experiences exploring the surrounding woods and fields helped shape his appreciation for nature. He studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art before earning his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980. He later returned to Chicago, receiving his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986. After many years on Vashon Island, Washington, Kroll relocated to a rural Maine, where he continues his painting practice.

Kroll’s work has been exhibited extensively in galleries and museums throughout the United States, including the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Boise Art Museum, and the South Bend Museum of Art. He has presented numerous solo exhibitions at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago and galleries across the country. His paintings are represented in prominent public and private collections, including the Boise Art Museum, Grand Valley State University Art Museum, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Muskegon Museum of Art.

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Tags: Chicago, David Kroll, David Kroll: New Paintings, Near North Side, Zolla Lieberman Gallery