Gary Zack

Gary Zack is an American artist whose career moves between stained glass, glassblowing, and painting, with color and composition at the center of everything he makes. He built his early reputation in stained glass, a medium that forces strong decisions: shapes have to hold, contrast has to work, and color has to read in changing light. That discipline gave him a designer’s instinct for structure, and it’s still visible in his paintings today. When he moved into hot glass, he expanded that same obsession into a more physical language, learning how color blends, how transparency shifts, and how light behaves when it’s passing through material instead of sitting on top of it.

In 1990, Zack founded Symmetry, his glassblowing shop and gallery, and it became a defining chapter of his career, both as a working studio and as a place connected to contemporary glass and fine craft. His acrylic paintings translate that entire background into two dimensions: layered surfaces, confident value shifts, and pattern and texture used with intention rather than decoration. The best way to describe the work is “built,” not “painted,” because the surface carries real weight, yet the composition stays clean and readable from across a room. Whether he’s making small color studies or larger pieces, Zack’s work holds onto the same core idea that’s driven him across mediums: let color do the heavy lifting, and make the structure strong enough to support it. ×