Mark Stock "Oil Paintings"
M. Sutherland Fine Arts Ltd.
This event has ended.
Mark Stock is a master illusionist who paints unspoken emotion with sleight of hand. In this special exhibition at M. Sutherland Fine Arts, the Oakland-based artist exhibits paintings in two distinct genres: large, dramatic narratives reminiscent of scenes out of film noir and smaller works meticulously painted in trompe l’oeil style.
Born in 1951 in Frankfurt, Germany, Stock was an Army brat who went on to Gemini Gel where he printed for Raushenberg, Johns, and Lichtenstein. While living in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, Stock began painting self-portraits of himself as a lovelorn butler whose professionalism requires him to contain his emotions. The large scale works of pensive butlers and daydreaming women imply off-stage narratives, regrets and dreams. Stock explains, “I paint people thinking. I try to capture them in the moment. Just what it is they are thinking is up to the viewer to decipher.”
Five years later in London, Kasuo Ishiguro wrote a novel, The Remain of the Day, about a British butler who hides his emotions. As kindred spirits, Stock and Ishiguro began a correspondence that lead to the novelist writing: “In these images—somewhere between gorgeous dreamscape and forties movie still—Mark Stock shows us, hauntingly and movingly, the heart than can no longer bear to remain well-hidden. His subjects—a butler, a bellhop, a socialite—are caught just at that point when their inner longings spill out over their carefully constructed public personae….Stock’s world is universal and profound not simply because we so easily identify with these people, but also because we sense that tragedy awaits them…”
The gem-like trompe l’oeil works are playfully cerebral rather than emotional. In one work we see a portrait of a craggy faced man “drawn” in “chalk” on a “blackboard.” Who is he? Stock gives us a clue by “taping” three “postcards” in the corner that include Duchamp’s famous urinal as fountain.
Some of the trompe l’oeil works bear references to Stock’s other interests: the artist is also an accomplished magician, jazz drummer, and a champion golfer with a three handicap. “All these activities influence my painting,” he says.
His art is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. We are honored to work with Modernism, Inc., of San Francisco, to organize Mark Stock’s landmark painting exhibition in New York City.
[Image: Mark Stock "The Butler is in Love" (2007)]
Media
Schedule
from May 20, 2010 to June 19, 2010