Wendy Mark is Beginning with Square One in New York

Associated media

New York gallerist Jill Newhouse is currently showing new work by Wendy Mark

‘Beginning With Square One’
including a site specific installation, ‘CloudSpace’by AGENCY

Now on until 14 November 2014

‘TheFragment/Recollection/Disappearance/Addition/Contrast/Weight and Shadow/The Fugueare all explored within the space of a square – beginning with square one.' (Wendy Mark)

‘Beginning with Square One’explores the use of squares as grids, frames and space, and as active participants in the construction and deconstruction of images.  The multi-media exhibit of work, including Mark’s monotypes, watercolours, mirror paintings, photographs, books, and small objects, alongside a site-specific installation by award-winning architects AGENCY, underscores the artist’s interest in collaboration, which infuses every one of her projects with special meaning and finds new forms for their realization. Each piece in the show explores and elaborates the theme with different material and optical techniques, engaging the viewer in a range of relationships to imagery and space.

Language, and forms of prose and poems, have always been at the centre of Wendy Mark’s work.  Working to both refine each image, and collections of images arranged in a grid, Mark explains, ‘each image is like a line of a poem, a segment, or verse of meaning.  These series of image/linesmake up the poem which is the whole piece, composed of this row or row of images.’

‘Beginning with Square One’includes the result of a new collaboration, a site-specific installation for the Jill Newhouse Gallery based on the spatial implications of Mark’s monotypes.  Designed and fabricated by AGENCY  a collaborative interdisciplinary practice engaging contemporary culture through architecture, urbanism, and advocacy, the architects explore resonances between digital processes and material artefacts shared in their work and the work of Wendy Mark.

 ‘Our goal’, the architects explain:

 is to translate the scale of the artwork into a three dimensional spatial experience for gallery visitors, who will be reflected in the infinitely expansive environment, captured in the seemingly weightless clouds. 

Wendy Markbegan her career as a writer and received her MFA from the poetry division of Columbia University School of the Arts. She writes: ‘reading poems and fiction is intrinsic to my life as well as my work as a painter’.  Limited edition books are part of her many solo exhibitions.  She has repeatedly sought to infuse her work with thought-provoking words and images, forging successful creative collaborations with Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Mark Strand, Charles Simic, Paul Muldoon and David St. John, and writers such as Adam Gopnik, Louis Menand, and the Spanish writer, Javier Marias.

Wendy Mark has had numerous solo exhibitions and her monotypes were included in the historical exhibition at The Smithsonian Institution ‘Singular Impressions: The monotype in America’. Other museum shows include The Lyman Allyn Museum in CT., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC and The Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan.  Her prints and books are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, The Spenser and Berg collections at the New York Public Library and numerous other museums. She is among the 20 artists cited by Thomas Hoving in his article in Cigar Aficionado, ‘Twenty Artists Who May Be the Picassos and Monets of the 21st Century’.

Jill Newhouse says, “Wendy Mark’s art transforms traditional, classical imagery and makes it current. The skies and clouds of Constable and Turner become the dots and grids of the 21st century.”

Jill Newhouse
4 East 81 Street
New York

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