The bewitching paintings of Ilya Zomb seen to depict a parallel universe, a place of strange, graceful beauty populated by a delicate cast of women and birds, attentive animals and lavish fruits and flowers. Over the decades of his practice, first in his native Russia, and then in New York, Zomb has cultivated and honed his singular vision, fleshing out his fictional realm with unrelenting passion. While Zomb’s precise, lush, and luminous technique is akin to the style of Renaissance masters, his subject matter nods to Surrealism and to magical realist literature, which likewise integrates fabulist and fairytale elements. His Compositions tend to defy gravity, as if to say that art is above all a space of suspension, where beauty becomes the highest law and the restrictions of the real world fall away.