Robert Zurer was born in New York City and grew up amid Greenwich Village’s creative community of the ‘50s and ‘60s. He started drawing in early childhood. He and his father often played a game where his father scribbled some lines on paper and asked him to make a drawing from them. This kind of automatic drawing continues to inform his paintings to this day. In the early ‘70s, he worked in watercolor and gouache on paper until switching to oils in 1988.

 

Zurer is primarily self-taught, although from 1999 to 2006 he attended weekly classes with the painter and teacher Wade Schuman at Wade's loft in the Garment District. He also attended sessions at the NYC Crit Club for many years. In 2018, in order to be able to paint full time, Zurer quit his day job, leased his loft in Brooklyn, and moved to Philadelphia. Soon after, he co-founded Philly Crit and is currently one of its four coordinators.

 

In 2022, Zurer was accepted into the White Columns Curated Artist Registry. He has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, the Arts, Letters & Numbers Residency, and will soon be a resident at Byrdcliffe. His work is held in private collections and has been exhibited in numerous shows in and around New York, as well as in Philadelphia, Boston, Nashville, New Haven, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Edinburgh, Scotland and elsewhere.