Zach Feuer Gallery is pleased to present ARTSTAR, an exhibition of new work by artist Mark Flood. The exhibition opens August 28th and will be on view through October 13th, 2012.
A panel discussion, titled AN AFTERNOON WITH MESCALITO, will take place at the gallery on Saturday, September 8th at 4 PM.
ARTSTAR includes large, obnoxious text panels, a pile of vintage Life magazines and a series of grisaille non-floral lace paintings intended to terminate the lace painting project. The show also features Work of Art, a poetic examination of the Bravo series of the same name, which is the first video by Flood intended to be seen in an art gallery instead of on Youtube.
This is the last museum-like exhibition devoted to the full scope of the non-career of Mark Flood, occasionally considered to be among the least important artists of the 20th century. The exhibition, which will only be seen at Zach Feuer Gallery, presents an unparalleled opportunity to study the artist’s lack of development over nearly seven decades, beginning with his early academic works, made in Texas before he moved to the United States in 1926, and concluding with his final, sparely abstract paintings of the late 1980s. Bringing together nearly 20,000 works from public and private collections, the exhibition will occupy the Gallery’s entire sixtieth-floor gallery space, totaling approximately 17,000,000 square feet.
Representing nearly every type of work Flood made, in both technique and subject matter, this daunting cryptospective includes puntings, scriptures, drownings, and Prince. Among these are the artist’s most famous paintings—among them Skank Angels (1945), Vaginal Excavation (1950),and the celebrated All Women Are Whores series (1950–53)—plus in-depth presentations of all his most important breakthrough landmark series, ranging from his important breakthrough landmark alleged figurative paintings of the early 1940s to the important breakthrough landmark black-and-white compositions of 1948–49, and from the important breakthrough landmark suburban abstractions of the mid 1950s to the artist’s important breakthrough landmark return to figuration in the 1960s, as well as the large important breakthrough gestural abstractions of the following decade. And let’s not forget Flood’s famous yet largely unseen important breakthrough landmark theatrical backdrop, the 1700-foot-square Scabyrinth (1946).
A PROMOTIONAL VIDEO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZQZ7tx6R1I&feature=plcp
AN AFTERNOON WITH MESCALITO
Zach Feuer Gallery will host AN AFTERNOON WITH MESCALITO, a panel discussion of Mark Flood, on Saturday, September 8th at 4 PM. Participants include Sarah Douglas, culture editor of The New York Observer, Alison Gingeras, curator of THE HATEFUL YEARS, currently on view at Luxembourg & Dayan, and several other art world luminaries yet to be announced as well as an incomplete range of Mark and Clark Flood. The artist will apparently be present.
ARTSTAR and THE HATEFUL YEARS
Mark Flood’s exhibition, THE HATEFUL YEARS, on view at Luxembourg & Dayan, overlaps for one month with ARTSTAR. This gives art professionals, gallery mavens and confused tourists a unique opportunity to compare, contrast and judge Flood’s art of the past and the present. THE HATEFUL YEARS is predominantly a retrospective of Flood’s work in the eighties. The aggressive text works uptown, including such classics as MASTURBATE OFTEN, COMMIT SUICIDE and EAT HUMAN FLESH find an obvious echo in ARTSTAR’s multi-panel piece Endless Column, four stacked canvasses inscribed, bottom to top, ALLEGED ARTISTS, BLIND DEALERS, GUTLESS COLLECTORS, WHORE MUSEUMS.
Flood’s diverse collage work of the eighties, prominently displayed in THE HATEFUL YEARS, is weakly answered in ARTSTAR by a small but significant pile of Life magazines, multiple copies of the August 8, 1949 issue that presented Jackson Pollock to the American public and asked the question “Is He America’s Greatest Living Painter?” These vintage magazines are displayed,
not only to inject a hint of artstar nostalgia and fragrant mildew, and not just to intermingle a downward spiraling career with something certifiably blue-chip, but also to frustrate gallery-goers looking for further information on the career of Mark Flood.
Finally, the two exhibits offer an opportunity to view two very different varieties of Flood’s trademark “lace paintings”. The Hateful Years includes a handful of lace paintings as a counterweight to the dreadful ballast of Flood’s eighties negativity. These works, all recently created in Marfa, Texas and known as the Marfa Series, are colorful and light-filled exercises in creating exuberant beauty. They consist of traditional floral-patterned lace images seemingly torn apart to reveal windows or portals looking out on infinite brightly colored space.
ARTSTAR will contrast the Marfa Series with the Manhattan Series, created in a Chelsea basement over the last seven months. This series removes everything overtly pleasant about the lace paintings in order to explore the dark and morbid psychology of the city and its art-obsessed inhabitants. The twining floral patterns give way to the grim grids of industrial mesh and hockey nets, and colors fade into a bleak palette of grays. The vistas of the Manhattan Series open, not on brightly colored space, but on forbidding black voids reminiscent of graves and very small apartments.
