(Im)perfect rhythm
Frédérique Q.R. Zacharia
GALLERY I
Frédérique Q.R. Zacharia, detail of Grandma's Couch, Stamped black ink, red thread, on 4×4 notebook paper, quilt, 23.5 x 31 inches.
August 8 - 30, 2026
Opening reception: Saturday, August 8 from 6-8pm
A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce (Im)perfect rhythm, an exhibition by Frédérique Q.R. Zacharia that brings together three interconnected bodies of work — typewritten compositions, sewn pages, and hand-stamped "quilts" — for the first time. This is Zacharia’s first solo show in New York City.
Zacharia’s journey began in January 2021, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, when she set out on a trip visiting thrift stores in the Hudson Valley in search of a typewriter and came home with two. What began as a small find became something unexpected: a quiet, absorbing practice built on repetition, rhythm, and the pleasure of an imperfect mark. Typing, for Zacharia, was never about words — it was about pattern, sound, and touch, a meditative activity that let the mind settle into something steadier and slower.
That same pull toward repetition carried into sewing and, later, printmaking. Zacharia began hand carving-stamps pressing them again and again to create serial imagery on a variety of (widely available/modest) papers such as Kraft paper, 4x4 notebook paper, letter sized printer paper and ledger paper. Individually printed sheets are gathered and sewn into larger "quilt" compositions, works that feel at once orderly and alive — uniform at a glance, but full of small variation up close.
Across all three bodies of work, the exhibition poses a single, unifying question: What emerges when a humble, ordinary tool is repeated past the point of perfection? It is a show about beginning something new later in life, starting small, and discovering that limitation is often where the real work begins.
Frédérique Q.R. Zacharia was born and raised in the Netherlands. Enrolled in art and sculpture classes from a young age, she went on to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, then heavily influenced by the Bauhaus principles, and earned a degree in Interior and Architectural design. After moving to New York in 1985 she worked as an interior architect for Kohn Pedersen Fox Conway Associates in New York City before raising four children. Always one foot in the arts, she explored woodworking and welding, as well as sewing which carries on in her practice today. Her work has been shown at Pulp Gallery (Holyoke, MA) as well as 4forArt (Lenox, MA).
View the Press Release here.