Mark Sheinkman Exhibition

Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.

This event has ended.

This is Mark Sheinkman’s first solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg, and his first in New York since 2011.
Until several years ago, a white oil and alkyd ground was covered with graphite that was subsequently removed with rags and erasers, establishing over-layers of undulating, curving lines. The marks read as “figure” while actually revealing “ground.” The twelve paintings in this exhibition reveal a change of direction in his distinctive work.

Sheinkman has expanded the role of additive mark-making in the new work. The direct application of oil and alkyd paint and a larger measure of brushwork has resulted in gestures with a wider range of characteristics of thick and thin, hard and soft. In many of these paintings, he has so entirely entangled the marks that the layering is ambiguous, even contradictory. This complicates the implied depth of field and introduces a snap of tension between spatial illusion and factual surface.

Each painting is begun with only the parameters of the materials, process and format that Sheinkman has chosen. He proceeds mark by mark, action by action, decision by decision, revision by revision.

He doesn’t advance with a plan or destination in mind. His process is flexible and fluid, and allows him considerable leeway to react and change course, continuing until a conclusion has been achieved. “The process is what’s engaging,” he says, “because you’re paying attention all the time.”
“Restrictions open up all kinds of possibilities,” Sheinkman says. Breaking one of them wide open after years of exploring curves, he has reintroduced straight lines and gestures into his paintings, opening up a new range of potential for formal exploration and art historical associations. The layered webs and idiosyncratic processes of Jackson Pollock, Brice Marden and Terry Winters have been mentioned in connection to Sheinkman’s work, but the recent deployment of straight, darting diagonal brushstrokes unsupported by an underlying grid points as well in the direction of Willem de Kooning and issues of pictorial space rooted in Cubism.

In 2009, we selected two Sheinkman paintings for inclusion in a thematic exhibition about contemporary approaches to gestural abstraction called Action Precision. The title was respectfully borrowed from an important 1984 show of paintings by six of the younger Abstract Expressionists, curated by Paul Schimmel. His show was about the ways in which Joan Mitchell, Michael Goldberg, Al Held, Alfred Leslie, Grace Hartigan and Norman Bluhm invigorated a canon coalescing during the 1950s. Ours was about the ways in which certain painters today manifest the ongoing viability of expression through gestural improvisation in an era opened irreversibly to the innumerable approaches available to artists today. In Sheinkman’s hands, along with numerous other contemporary painters, gestural abstraction remains fertile territory for question, response and exploration.

Mark Sheinkman was born in New York in 1963 and received a B.A. from Princeton University. He began exhibiting his work in New York in 1989, and before long had solo shows at galleries in Houston, London and Belgium. In 1997, he began a long association with Von Lintel Gallery in Munich, later located in New York and Los Angeles where he had an exhibition in the spring of 2016. He had solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri in 2005, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan in 2008 and the Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst, Otterndorf, Germany in 2009.

In the past five years, his work has been included in group exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Crocker Museum in Sacramento and the Grand Rapids Art Museum.

His work is included in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Grand Rapids Museum of Art, the Harvard University Art Museum in Cambridge, Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, and the Weatherspoon Art Gallery in Greensboro, North Carolina.