July 28–September 3, 2022
Mark Greenwold: Fragments
July 28–September 3, 2022
Mark Greenwold: Fragments
Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce the gallery’s fifth online viewing room, Mark Greenwold: Fragments. Opening July 28, 2022, the exhibition will feature nine works in various stages of production, providing a rare glimpse into the artist’s process. The selection, consisting of studies, drawings, and incomplete paintings, span the artist’s career, from his sleek but unsettling works of the late ’60s and early ’70s, to his more recent psychodramas.
Kitchen Painting, 1980–1983
Oil on canvas
22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches
Greenwold sets Kitchen Painting (1980–1983) in what could have been the shooting location for Julia Child’s The French Chef. Amidst expensive copper pots, fruit bowls, and electric mixers, a young Greenwold restrains a domestic partner conspicuously wielding an 8-inch chef’s knife. The couple turns to the kitchen’s entryway where, at the threshold, a young boy aims a pistol.
Throughout his career, Greenwold has sourced interiors from the pages of design magazines. The unfinished works make the tension between these ideal (if overdesigned) spaces and the imperfect people that inhabit them particularly explicit.
Untitled, 1983
Gouache and graphite on paper
14 1/2 x 17 inches
In Untitled (1983), Greenwold restages a similar domestic drama, again pulling a child into a couple’s violence. The balding Greenwold takes cover as his partner thrashes him with a flimsy wire coat hanger. This time, the gun-wielding child amplifies the humiliation and emasculation, serving as a dramatic counterpoint to the man’s inaction and passivity.
While the interior is complete down to the last details, Greenwold’s characters are mere drawings. The artist is famous for his laborious attention to detail. The artist works under magnification, like a jeweler, employing the tiniest of brushes. He builds up the surfaces stroke by stroke, all the while flipping between various preparatory photographs and drawings. The result is a kind of delirious realism in which everything portrayed, however realistic, is actually composed of thousands upon thousands of beautiful abstractions.
Study For And Now What?, 2016
Mixed media on paper
19 x 20 inches
In many works Greenwold isolates a single fragment of the composition by masking the rest of the canvas. Only after he’s finished does he proceed to the next section. Within the context of this work, the unfinished figures are like ghosts recalling a fatal episode in the interior’s history.
Born in Cleveland in 1942, Mark Greenwold studied painting at Carnegie Mellon University, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and Indiana University. Since 1979, he has had fewer than a dozen solo-exhibitions, two of which contained only one painting. His 1995 mid-career retrospective, Mark Greenwold: The Odious Facts, 1975–1995, contained a scant 27 works—virtually his entire mature oeuvre—and took place at the Colby College Museum of Art. His paintings have appeared in numerous recent group exhibitions, including Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque (2005, SITE Santa Fe), Embracing Modernism (2015, Morgan Library and Museum), and Intimacy in Discourse (2015, Mana Contemporary).
Greenwold’s work is in the permanent collections of major museums across the United States, including: the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; the Hirshhorn Museum of Art and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Morgan Library and Museum, New York; the National Academy Museum, New York; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Mark Greenwold
Mark Greenwold: Fragments will be available to view online, through September 3, 2022. For more information, please contact Garth Greenan at (212) 929-1351, or email info@garthgreenan.com.