Mark Moore Fine Art and the artist are pleased to announce the acquisition of a major work by artist MARK BENNETT by The Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation.
Mark Bennett’s (b. 1956, Tennessee) whimsical works engage with pop culture and celebrity to an extreme degree. His blueprint lithographs of Baby Boom era sitcoms and popular television series depict the ultimate pairing of flight of fancy and stoical logic; the purely imaginary floor plans grounded by the dry format of an architect’s design. His works are both pleasingly nostalgic and vaguely disconcerting in their premonition of a society obsessed by television and celebrity culture.
Earning reverence from both critics and collectors alike, Bennett has been coined a master of nostalgia and social evaluation, acting as “the most earnest of his generation of West Coast artists drawing on popular culture” (Grady T. Turner, Art in America).
Since his induction into the gallery in 1995, Bennett has been included in over three dozen significant museum and group exhibitions, including those at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (D.C.), Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (CT), Walker Art Center (MN) and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA). His work has been acquired for the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Laguna Art Museum (CA), Crocker Art Museum (CA), Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, University of Nevada Las Vegas (NV), Museum of Fine Art Houston (TX), Corcoran Gallery of Art (DC), West Collection (PA), McNay Art Museum (TX), and the Portland Art Museum (OR), among others.
The Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation is dedicated to continuing the legacy and vision of Frederick R. Weisman, an extraordinary entrepreneur, philanthropist, and art collector. He held an uncompromising belief in the cultural value of art and understood the importance of both the individual artist and the creative process. In carrying out Mr. Weisman’s intentions, the Foundation seeks to preserve, collect, and make publicly accessible his collection of modern and contemporary art as a means to strengthen and contribute to the greater artistic and intellectual life of our time. In 1982, Frederick R. Weisman purchased the Los Angeles estate to serve as a showcase for his personal collection of 20th-century art. He and his wife, Billie Milam Weisman, an art conservator and curator, worked together to create a unique environment located within the Mediterranean-style villa. More than four hundred works of art are on display at the Foundation. The collection includes works by European Modernists, including Cezanne, Picasso, and Kandinsky, and Surrealist works by Ernst, Miro, and Magritte. The holdings in postwar art include works by Giacometti, Noguchi, Calder, Rauschenberg, and Johns; Abstract Expressionist paintings by de Kooning, Francis, Still, and Rothko; Color-Field paintings by Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland; and Pop Art by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, and Rosenquist. Contemporary California works include those by Ruscha and Goode and Super Realist sculptures by Hanson and de Andrea. These holdings are part of a larger collection that Mr. Weisman established as the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation in 1982. Currently, under the direction of Billie Milam Weisman, the Foundation continues to make the collection available through loans to museums worldwide, docent tours at the Los Angeles estate, exhibitions in public-art venues, and the funding of several art museums, including the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in Malibu, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, designed by Frank O. Gehry. |
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