Mark Flood Owl, 2010 acrylic on canvas 30 x 18 inches
21st February – 22nd March 2014 www.modernart.net/
Modern Art is to present a solo exhibition of new works by Mark Flood. This is the American artist’s first solo show with Modern Art, and is the first exhibition of his work in Britain.
Since the early 1980s, Mark Flood has been making and exhibiting paintings, collages, sculptures, videos, and music. For the first 20 years of his career he barely showed outside Texas, working in studios in relative obscurity in his native Houston. Flood’s paintings and collages of the 1980s and 1990s transform pervasive corporate, pornographic and celebrity imagery into provocative and knowing grotesques of the colliding worlds of art and consumer culture using adulterated found materials: signs, advertisements, flea-market paintings, and magazines. The character of Flood’s work is not the critique of a detached and ironic appropriationist, but rather more a tirade of extreme opinion in a heated argument about culture.
Over recent years, Mark Flood’s influence has increasingly been felt in the work of younger generations of American artists. His current practice’s most recognisable work is that of ongoing series’ of paintings. Since 2000 he has produced a body of ‘lace paintings’ – wilfully beautiful canvases luridly coloured and richly patterned with impressions of decorative lace. His text paintings on monochrome canvases or found panels overspray lettering in missives urging the exploration of sexuality, the committing of suicide, or deadpan self-description. Most recently, a new series of paintings lift corporate logos from websites in low resolution and blow them up on canvas into a degraded image of massive pixels.
For this exhibition at Modern Art, Mark Flood presents a group of new lace paintings, and a group of new logo paintings.
www.modernart.net/
About The Artist
Mark Flood was born in Houston, Texas, USA, in 1957, where he continues to live and work. He studied at Rice University, Houston, Texas, graduating in 1981. In 2015 Mark Flood’s work will be the subject of a solo survey exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX, USA.
