Category Archives: Mark Moore Gallery

The gallery is proud to announce the acquisition of work by David Klamen by the McNay Art Museum (TX). Now included in the museum’s permanent collection, “Untitled (Velazquez)” (2009) is an excellent example of the artist’s coveted (and somewhat rare) works on paper.

David Klamen’s (American, b.1961) work grows in conjunction with his interest in philosophy and scholarship, centralized around the questions,”How do I know what I know?” and “How do I know myself?” Klamen paints figuratively and abstractly, sometimes combining the two by incorporating geometric lines or patterns atop his high finished landscapes. Says Richard Gray Gallery, “His current paintings test epistemological strategies as diverse as OP Art (and its implication that knowledge may be a purely retinal experience), empiricism (the idea that the sole source of knowledge is direct quantifiable experience), introspection, and others. In this investigation, Klamen plays with the history of art, utilizing modern and pre-modern conventions as metaphors for our communal search for meaning.”

Klamen earned his Bachelor’s of Fine Arts at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana in 1983 and his Master’s of Fine Arts in Painting at the School of the Art Institute in 1985. He is currently is a Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University Northwest. Klamen is represented in the following public collections: the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (CA), the Museum of Contemporary Art (IL), the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), the Chazen Museum of Art (WI), and National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea.

For more information about the artist, or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

The gallery is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of work by gallery artist David Maisel by the Crocker Art Museum (CA). Now part of the museum’s permanent collection, “The Lake Project 6” (2001) is from the artist’s heralded body of work by the same name.

As of yesterday, October 2, 2014, Mark Moore Gallery has been open for thirty years. Founded by Mark and Hilarie Moore in Long Beach (CA), the gallery has seen three decades’ worth of exhibitions, art fairs, special projects, and market changes.

Mark received his BA from the University of California, Irvine in 1981. As a graduate of UCI’s progressive art program, he has shared the aesthetic of the department and emphasized the work of contemporary artists working in the areas of post-modern, spiritualist, minimalist, or conceptual concerns. He currently still resides in Orange County, where he has lived since 1967.

The Moores initiated an active art education program which included free tours to studios and museums, lectures, and panel discussions and was a frequent guest lecturer to art institutions and support groups in Southern California. Mark also served on the steering committee for the Fine Arts Advisory Board at CSULB, Laguna Art Museum Collections, and Crystal Court/ South Coast Plaza. In 1988, the Moores’ first gallery space was selected by The Orange County Register as one of Southern California’s ten best galleries. In 1988, the gallery was also selected by the SLOOC and the Ministry of Culture of the Government of South Korea to represent the United States at the Olympics Art Festival during the Seoul Olympics – the only gallery so honored. In 1989, L.A. Artcore, a leading non-profit arts organization, selected Mr. Moore as its first recipient of the L.A. Artcore Award of Merit in the Arts (an award given to L.A. Councilman Joel Wachs in 1990 and the late Marcia Weissman in 1991).

The gallery relocated to Los Angeles in 1994 in order to focus on the international secondary market of major works and important emerging artists. Shortly thereafter, it was selected by the Art Market Guide as one of the “Top 35 Galleries in America” in 1998. The gallery has participated in the most important of the major international fairs, including: the Art Chicago International Art Fair, Art Cologne, Gramercy International Art Fair, PULSE Art Fairs (Miami, London, and New York), NADA Art Fair Miami, Scope Art Fair (Miami, Los Angeles, and New York), the Armory International Art Fair in New York (from its inception until 2002), and currently, the Dallas Art Fair, Moving Image Video Art Fair, and Miami Project.

One of the most notable achievements of the Mark Moore Gallery was the orchestration and organization of the monumental 1998 sculpture exhibition of works by Mark Di Suvero. The public exhibition was produced in concert with the Orange County Museum of Art and shown in Town Center Park in Costa Mesa (CA) for a duration of nine months. This was the largest exhibition of outdoor sculpture by Mark Di Suvero in the United States in nearly twenty-five years and was the most prestigious and encompassing display of his work in California. The only comparable shows of this scale were both in Europe (the 1995 Venice Biennale and a Parisian solo show in 1987), up until the current SFMoMA-sponsored display in Chrissy Field (San Francisco, CA).

The Mark Moore Gallery also pioneered the development of contemporary art market in Korea over the last 25 years, producing inaugural Korean exhibitions for artists such as Ed Ruscha, Christopher Wool, Gunter Forg, Vernon Fisher, Lucas Samaras, Joel Shapiro, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, John McCracken, Sol Lewitt, Jannis Kounellis, Richard Artschwager, and Gerhard Richter. In addition, the gallery has done extensive work in the secondary market, mounting exhibitions in Seoul featuring Agnes Martin, Sigmar Polke, Bruce Nauman, Cy Twombly, early Frank Stella paintings, Robert Ryman, Robert Therrien, Ad Reinhardt, Jasper Johns, David Smith, Robert Mangold, Roy Lichtenstein, Anselm Keifer, Robert Irwin, Sean Scully, and Terry Winters. The organization of exhibitions and the building of major private and public global collections has become a major function of the Mark Moore Gallery.

The Mark Moore Gallery has always focused on the development of emerging artists and has gained a solid international reputation as one of the premier sites for new talent. Over the last thirty years, the Mark Moore Gallery has included or debuted the work of numerous young artists in the early stages of their careers – many of whom have later gone on to tremendous international success. The Mark Moore Gallery currently represents twenty-nine emerging and mid-career artists.

He and his wife head the Mark and Hilarie Moore Family Trust, and are active in supporting the arts in Southern California. They continue to be major donors of contemporary art to a number of national museums. He and his wife are also aid a number of local charities that support the education in the arts, resources for the homeless, services for abused children, veteran’s healthcare, and the continuing the fight against AIDS. They have two children, Catlin (who is currently the Director of Mark Moore Gallery) and Devin, and have been married for 30 years as of December, 2014.

We congratulate Mark and Hilarie on this incredible anniversary and accomplishment, and certainly wish to see another thirty years in their gallery’s future.

Gallery artist Kiel Johnson is currently featured in “ArtWatch 2014: Young Careers – Santa Barbara to Greater LA” at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art (CA). Shown alongside Stephanie Dotson, Julia Haft-Candell, Nathan Huff, Laura Krifka, Chris Rupp, Devon Tsuno, and Liat Yossifur, Johnson’s work will be on view through November 22, 2014 at the museum. Says the museum:

The Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art is launching an ArtWatch series that will focus on different issues and themes that engage contemporary artists living on the West Coast. The first in the series examines eight artists, young in their careers, but fully launched as artists-to-watch.

Admission to the museum is free. Johnson’s upcoming solo exhibition at the gallery, “Walldayallday,” will be on view concurrently with this museum show through November 8, 2014. For information about the artist, or available work, please email info@markmooregallery.com

Whitehot Magazine’s critic Megan Abrahams recently reviewed the gallery’s current solo exhibition by the Clayton Brothers. We congratulate the artists on her positive appraisal of the show!

Says Abrahams:

Playful, poignant, popping with color, bordering on quizzical, this broad and engaging exhibit by the Clayton Brothers explores evocative narrative themes extrapolated from the scene of a thrift shop in Sun Valley, California. This body of work is characterized by a quality of spontaneity, which in part may be attributed to the brothers’ process. Working on the same pieces at different times, they overlap, making it unclear where one brother may have left off and the other picked up. The style of these works also has a sense of immediacy. A preponderance of the pieces are free-form mixed media works on paper, sometimes combining elements of collage and assemblage with drawing and painting. Dynamic, gestural and layered with color as they are, the work manages to capture a sense of the excitement shoppers might feel on discovering treasures among the cast-off items at the store. Contributing to the sense of nostalgia, consistent with the thrift store theme, the works are framed in pastel colors reminiscent of the palette and luster of 1950s-era Fiestaware pottery…

Rob and Christian Clayton may be poking fun at thrift store culture, but in a gentle way, without a hint of malice. Even the darker aspects — the borderline hoarding and obsessive browsing, the economic context that requires purchasing used consumer goods — are conveyed with a sense of benevolence and self-awareness as to their own participation and embrace of the thrifting system. Open to the Public might be seen as a light-hearted homage to the appeal of found object as an art-historical trope, as well as to the quasi-performative thrill of the act of repurposing and recontextualizing a humble, discarded thing.

“Open to the Public” will close today, September 27, 2014. For information about the artists, or available work, please email info@markmooregallery.com

Gallery artist Penelope Umbrico will be featured at the New York Art Book Fair – which takes place September 26-28 at MoMA PS1 – in celebration of her new book, “Out of Order: Used Office Desks and Used Office Plants For Sale.” Produced by RVB Books, the book delves into Umbrico’s interest in the fluid ownership of objects and images, as well as the shifting perception of photography.

The artist will be signing books at the fair tomorrow, September 27th, at table C18 starting at 5pm.

Free and open to the public, the NY Art Book Fair is the world’s premier event for artists’ books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines. This year, the fair features over 350 booksellers, antiquarians, artists, institutions and independent publishers from twenty-eight countries. Last year’s fair was attended by more than 27,000 people.

We congratulate Penelope on the release of this publication, and look forward to hosting her upcoming solo exhibition at the gallery, “Mountains, Moving: Light Leaks, and Chemical Burns” (opening Thursday, October 2, 6-8pm).

For additional information about the artist or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com

Gallery artist David Maisel is the current focus of our Featured Works section of the website. In his new body of work, “The Fall,” Maisel has utilized the topography and geography of Spain as a way to engage in art historical, and sociopolitical narratives.

In Fall of 2013, Maisel was invited to Spain as part of the photographic project Toledo Contemporánea, in which twelve photographers were commissioned to create work about the Spanish city of Toledo as a celebration of the fourth centennial of the painter El Greco. Maisel’s work in his most recent body of work, titled “The Fall” is his response to the areas between the city of Toledo, which was once the cultural epicenter of Europe, and the much larger capital city of Madrid. In The Fall, one feels that the worlds of painting and photography have merged together. The series is based on three different areas of the Spanish landscape:

• Borox –strange, ashen landscapes in a mining and agricultural region of La Mancha. The soil is laden with the mineral borax, which gives a surreal, ashen quality; the landscape shines, almost like a grey sea in a desert.
• Vicalvaro – developments on the periphery of Madrid, where construction was halted after the economic collapse of 2008. The abandoned zones appear like the surreal aftermath of a bombed out city or an alien landing field.
• Fuensalida – croplands in the La Mancha region, gridded, crosshatched, and abstracted.

In addition to referencing the canon of abstraction and photography in this work, Maisel’s new works fit within his longstanding images of radically altered terrain. His hallucinatory worldview encompasses both stark documentary and tragic metaphor, and explores the relationship between nature and humanity today.

Maisel currently has works on view at the University of New Mexico Art Museum (NM) (Maisel will speak on his work on Tuesday, October 21, 5:30 PM at this location), the National Academy of Sciences (DC), and the Musée des Beaux-Artes de Bordeaux (France). For additional information about this artist, or works available, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

The gallery is proud to announce gallery artist Allison Schulnik‘s recent win at the Ottawa International Animation Festival for “Best Experimental/Abstract Animation.” Her film, “Eager” (2014), was shown during the festival (which ran September 17-21) – where it made its Canadian debut at the festival, and was shown alongside several other prestigious animated short film nominees.

We congratulate Allison on this incredible milestone! For available works or information about the artist, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

The gallery congratulates program artist Tim Bavington on joining the College of Fine Art’s faculty team at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. An alumnus of the school’s MA program, Bavington was also a 2014 inductee to the university’s Nevada Entertainer/Artist Hall of Fame.

UNLV is a doctoral-degree-granting institution of more than 27,000 students and 2,900 faculty and staff. Founded in 1957, the university offers more than 220 undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degree programs. UNLV is located on a 332-acre campus in dynamic Southern Nevada and is classified in the category of Research Universities (high research activity) by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The department of art in the College of Fine Arts offers the BA in art, the BFA in art, the BA in art history, and the MFA in art. The BA and BFA programs are available with concentrations in painting, drawing & printmaking, photography, graphic design, and sculpture. Bavington will focus largely on Color Theory, in addition to several other areas of concentration.

Music is the genesis of Bavington’s paintings. He is best known for translating music to canvas by assigning sounds to corresponding colors and compositions. His paintings are reminiscent of Op Art from the 1960s, yet possess the synthetic, digital glow of modern times. In his paintings, Bavington aligns the 12 notes of a musical scale with 12 tones of color from the color wheel. Using synthetic polymer paint, he translates audio — guitar music from The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Oasis — into vertical stripes of color that directly correspond to each note. Although his process adheres to a regimen, his paintings remain improvisational and rely on the decisions of his artistic presence. In addition to paintings, Bavington has explored large-scale sculptures, including an installation of musical energy translated to vertical bands of colored steel for The Smith Center for the Performing Arts (Las Vegas, NV). He also was awarded a General Services Adminstration Art in Architecture Award for his large-scale installation in the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building in Portland (OR).

Bavington’s work is included in the public collections of Fredrick R. Weisman Collection (Calif.), Honolulu Art Museum, Albright-Knox Art Gallery (N.Y.), Creative Artists Agency (Calif.), Joslyn Art Museum (Neb.), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (Calif.), Portland Art Museum (Ore.), United Talent Agency (Calif.), Vivendi Universal (Calif.), Palm Springs Art Museum (Calif.), Denver Art Museum (Colo.), The Museum of Modern Art (N.Y.), and Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University. He has exhibited at LeeAhn Gallery (Daegu), Jack Shainman Gallery (N.Y.), Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard (Paris), Space Gallery (London), Museum of Fine Arts (Mass.), Laguna Art Museum (Calif.), and the Texas Fine Arts Center among others.

For information about the artist, or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

We congratulate Tim on this major accomplishment!