Robert Rahway Zakanitch

Robert Rahway Zakanitch (born 1935, New Jersey) is an American painter and one of the founders of the Pattern and Decoration movement, which emerged in the 1970s as a celebration of ornamentation, craft, and decorative arts. He studied at the Newark School of Industrial and Fine Arts and initially worked as a commercial artist for a New York-based advertising company.
In the mid-1960s, Zakanitch left the commercial arts world to focus on fine art, working initially in an Abstract Expressionist style. While retaining the gestural spontaneity of this early period, his later works evolved to embrace representational elements. Flowers became a recurring motif in his art, and between 1979 and 1981, he created several exuberant floral series, including his Paper Pulp series (1981), a collection of 23 unique works crafted by applying pulps and dyes to specially constructed molds.
Zakanitch's vibrant, decorative works have earned a place in major museum collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Art Boston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.