Underwater

Zacks has spent two decades treating language as a paint color, not a caption. Trained at Brown and RISD, and best known publicly for a monumental commission at One Vanderbilt and murals inside Paris's Gare Montparnasse station, she works from the premise that a poem and a brushstroke are the same gesture pointed in different directions.

Underwater is built on a countdown. Stenciled numerals, one through ten, run diagonally across drips of teal, turquoise, and gold leaf, tracing the exact arithmetic every child runs in their head while holding their breath underwater: the moment you start counting is the moment you commit to staying under a little longer. Zacks renders that private, physical countdown as a visible structure, so the words aren't describing the sensation, they are the sensation, laid out in paint the way a diver's held breath is laid out in seconds.

It's the same instinct that's made her a recurring presence at SCOPE Miami and behind commercial commissions for Adobe, Sony, and Target: text doesn't sit on top of the image, it is the image. At 36 by 36 inches, Underwater is scaled for a room where it rewards being read as much as looked at, close enough to trace every drip.

This is a primary offering, sourced directly from the artist, with no prior owner.