Several Modest Fires offers an exhibition of new paintings by American painter, Mark Yang, at No. 9 Cork Street, London, on perspective right up until November 26thThe exhibition, Lucid Dream, signifies the artist’s first European exhibition, and the very first exhibition of his operates on paper. The artist was born in Seoul, South Korea. He grew up in California, and lives and works in New York.
Mark Yang paints the determine but is not fascinated in building narratives. As a substitute, he makes use of the human overall body as a conceptual jumping-off place to examine how we entwine, interact with, and examine other human beings.
Yang renders his varieties in an idiosyncratic, angular, graphically stylized method, dealing with physique areas as sculptures to be painted. His palette consists of dim purples, acid greens, shiny pops of yellow, orange, and red. He takes advantage of fluid gestures and undulating strains to generate entangled, mysterious, uneven compositions that never straight away give absent the plot.
Frequently, the viewer just can’t discern which limb is connected to which physique. Gratuitous legs wrap close to a single butt though various arms writhe in a tangled mass. These nonsensical knots connect volumes by design and style, system language, and other visible codes exceptional to human beings.
Yang generally avoids depicting faces in favor of ambiguity and a slow visual go through. When faces do look, they frequently snooze… or snooze eternally. Yang paints what he is familiar with, utilizing himself as a quotidian product. His figures – male, feminine, and gender neutral – provide as intellectual clay for their maker, not sexualized amusements. In truth, he exaggerates male nipples, turning them into official things, which resemble eyes and “look” back again at the viewer.
For his Cork Avenue exhibition, Yang grapples with numerous new themes. He considers the magical method of building new life, in Yeondu and Lucid Dream. He continues interpreting canonical is effective these types of as Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ, Michelangelo’s Battle of the Centaurs and Bartolini’s The Demidoff Table. Finally, in Anterior (evening) and Posterior (night time), Yang explores the spectre of the pandemic, as perfectly as other latest environment functions that have brought us visuals further than comprehension.
Human body language can be ambiguous, as can human beings. At the conclusion of the working day, Yang’s paintings examine the complexities and difficulties of being familiar with other human beings – a conceptual puzzle most of us confront on a day by day foundation.
