Mark Greenwold “Murdering the World, Paintings and Drawings 2007-2013”
Sperone Westwater
This event has ended.
Sperone Westwater presents Mark Greenwold’s first exhibition at the gallery. Given the extreme nature of Greenwold’s painting process, the slowness and deliberation with which the paintings are made, he shows rarely; his first exhibition in New York in 1979 consisted of a single small painting that took him three years to complete.
On view will be the last seven years of Greenwold’s production, smallish labor intensive paintings and drawings that depict couples and individuals in situations of familial and social complexity that has rarely been the subject of painting in the latter part of the twentieth century. The artist claims to be painting “fictions,” not what happened, but what might have happened. In today’s increasingly literal-minded times, people often conflate this complexity of the real and the imagined. Greenwold seems to revel in misunderstandings: pictorial, spatial, psychological… a blurring and fragmenting that he has characterized recently as an “emotional cubism.” The title of the show Murdering the World expresses Greenwold’s ambition, like most artists’, to remake things. His artistic heroes are visionaries – Andrei Tarkovsky, William Blake, and Bob Dylan – but his sensibility is very much of this moment, highly keyed to the quotidian.
Greenwold was born in 1942 in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from Indiana University.
[Image: Mark Greenwold “A Jewish Couple” (2011) oil on linen mounted on panel 22 x 28 in. Courtesy of Sperone Westwater]
Media
Schedule
from May 10, 2013 to June 28, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-05-10 from 18:00 to 20:00