Mark Moore Fine Art Blog

MARK BENNETT, Home of James West (The Wild Wild West), 2017, Lithograph on Rives BFK paper, 24 x 36 inches (Edition of 10) 

Mark Moore Fine Art is proud to present “Mark Bennett: Dream Houses – The Blueprint Drawings 1992-2017” an exclusive online ARTSY exhibition focusing on the Mark Bennett unique original “SitCom” drawings of the last two decades just recently released from the artist studio.

Concurrent with this presentation, I am very pleased to announce the release of a brand new very limited print edition related to this body of work, The Home of James West.

The Wild Wild West is an American television series that ran on the CBS television network for four seasons (104 episodes) from September 17, 1965 to April 4, 1969. Two television movies were made with the original cast in 1979 and 1980, and the series was adapted for a motion picture in 1999.

Developed at a time when the television western was losing ground to the spy genre, this show was conceived by its creator, Michael Garrison, as “James Bond on horseback.”. Set during the administration of President Ulysses Grant (1869–77), the series followed Secret Service agents James West (Robert Conrad) and Artemus Gordon (Ross Martin) as they solved crimes, protected the President, and foiled the plans of megalomaniacal villains to take over all or part of the United States.

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.

For the past 25 years, Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bennett has made art firmly rooted in the collective American experience of television. His drawings and lithographs are “blueprints” of famous television houses from such classic sitcoms as The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Brady Bunch, and Perry Mason. Drawing these fictional dwellings from memory, Bennett documents the minutiae of the characters’ lives by constructing their environments with a painstaking level of detail. His floor plans narrate the American Dream, charting not only the architecture, but also the subtext of our culturally accepted models for living.

You can view this exclusive ARTSY online exhibition of the original drawings that remain available from this body of work now by clicking on the follwing link below:

https://www.artsy.net/show/mark-moore-fine-art-mark-bennett-dream-houses-the-blueprint-drawings-1992-2017

To order, please contact Mark at: mark@markmoorefineart.com

This work is available subject to prior sale and prices are subject to change without notice. All taxes, tariffs, shipping and/or viewing expenses, if any, would be additional.

MARK BENNETT, Home of Jim & Margaret Anderson, 2017, Lithograph on Rives BFK paper, 24 x 36 inches (Edition of 10) 

https://www.artsy.net/artwork/mark-bennett-home-of-jim-and-margaret-anderson

Mark Moore Fine Art is proud to present “Mark Bennett: Dream Houses – The Blueprint Drawings 1992-2017” an exclusive online ARTSY exhibition focusing on the Mark Bennett unique original “SitCom” drawings of the last two decades just recently released from the artist studio.

Concurrent with this presentation, I am very pleased to announce the release of a brand new very limited print edition related to this body of work, THE HOME OF JIM AND MARGERET ANDERSON.

Most will remember this home on 607 South Maple Street in Springfield from the TV Sitcom “Father Knows Best” that starred Robert Young, Jane Wyatt, Elinor Donahue, Billy Gray, and Lauren Chapin. The series, which first began on radio in 1949, aired for six seasons with a total of 203 episodes. The series debuted on CBS in October 1954. It ran for one season and was canceled the following year. NBC picked up the series where it remained for three seasons. After a second cancellation in 1958, CBS picked up the series yet again where it aired until May 1960.

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.

For the past 25 years, Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bennett has made art firmly rooted in the collective American experience of television. His drawings and lithographs are “blueprints” of famous television houses from such classic sitcoms as The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Brady Bunch, and Perry Mason. Drawing these fictional dwellings from memory, Bennett documents the minutiae of the characters’ lives by constructing their environments with a painstaking level of detail. His floor plans narrate the American Dream, charting not only the architecture, but also the subtext of our culturally accepted models for living.

You can view this exclusive ARTSY online exhibition of the original drawings that remain available from this body of work now by clicking on the follwing link below:

https://www.artsy.net/show/mark-moore-fine-art-mark-bennett-dream-houses-the-blueprint-drawings-1992-2017

To order, please contact Mark at: mark@markmoorefineart.com

This work is available subject to prior sale and prices are subject to change without notice. All taxes, tariffs, shipping and/or viewing expenses, if any, would be additional.

John Bauer will tread a thin beauty and discord. Content of his repeated gestures combined as veneers referring to the description, as if condensing multiple film images into a single overall composition. Without reference to the external environment as much as internal psychological state, Bauer uses monochromatic palette associated with photography and the pixilated effect on the print media to heighten Sense of Virtuality and information overload. His images are full of frenetic, apocalyptic energy reflective urban experiences.

Despite the intense vivacity Bauer’s fabrics are piercingly harsh one. Was carried out only in a palette-gloss and matt black and metallic silver, Bauer’s paintings have introduced the elegance of the flat surfaces of the label is encoded within the glamor of the industrial design and holographic shine of futurism. Bauer through a densely stacked models, translucent layers, and an emotional journey, an impersonal characteristics of digitized imagery and his detached processes work to get the unique subjectivity of infusing a seamless and generics with the contemplative aura of personal consultations.

Merging real meanings of abstraction, the reproducibility of pop, and graphicness design, John Bauer’s canvases set up airplanes using the visual language of folds, confusing and should be re-fragmented, contradictory compositions. Beginning each painting is a low-technology, computer drawing, Bauer develops his work through the complex process includes hands-off painting techniques such as stenciling, silk-screening and spraying digitized graphics that turn towards the sublime picturesque areas abstraction.

Check out the Feature Article on ARTSY on this extremely talented artist “John Bauer Is Producing Heat after Death” By Brent Everett Dickinson at:

https://www.artsy.net/mark-moore-gallery/article/mark-moore-fine-art-john-bauer-producing-heat-death-brent-everett-dickinson

The San Diego Art Institute is excited to invite you to the opening of BC to BC on Saturday September 16th from 10am to 5pm featuring ceramic sculptures by 34 of the West Coast’s most innovative contemporary artists from Baja California to British Columbia. BC to BC is on view through October 20, 2017. 

Featured Artists: Allison Schulnik, Peter Shire, Jeffry Mitchell, Kristen Morgin, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Maggie Boyd, Juan Villavicencio, Clayton Bailey, Jeff Irwin, + many more!

Organized by N. American Souvenirs

• Saturday, September 16, 2017
• 10:00am 5:00pm 
• San Diego Art Institute1439 El PradoSan Diego, CA, 92101United States (map)

#markmoorefineart #sandiegoartinstitute #jeffrymitchell #allisonschulnik

Image: Kim Rugg, What The Duke Did Next, 2007 / Mark Moore Fine Art

Check out the review of the work on Kim Rugg on ARTSY at the following link:

https://www.artsy.net/mark-moore-gallery/article/mark-moore-fine-art-art-critic-leah-ollman-reviews-work-kim-rugg

Kim Rugg received her MFA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art (London). Her work can be seen in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art (D.C.) and the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (CA), the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), Honolulu Museum of Art, the Norton Museum (FL), and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (TX) among others. She has been included in exhibitions at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (CA), Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NY), Galerie Schmidt Maczollek (Cologne), and Nettie Horn Gallery (Manchester), P.P.O.W. Gallery (NYC), and was the recipient of the Thames and Hudson Prize from the Royal College of Art Society in 2004. She lives and works in London (UK).

#markmoorefineart #kimrugg

JOHN BAUER, Untitled (#1308), 2016; Oil and enamel on linen; 20 × 16 in (50.8 × 40.6 cm)

Mark Moore Fine Art presents an exclusive online ARTSY exhibition from September 12 through October 8, 2017 by Los Angeles painter JOHN BAUER. Marrying digital manipulation with traditional stenciling, spraying, rolling, brushing, and printing, John Bauer revisits the intimacy of Abstract Expressionist mark-making from a mediated postmodern distance.

Fueled by the Southern California surf culture of his youth, as well as the history and contemporary practices of abstraction, John Bauer creates paintings that channel the infinite potential of both the Pacific Ocean and gestural articulation. Inspired by purists like Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, and also postmodernists like Andy Warhol and Albert Oehlen, Bauer paints using both traditional and unconventional means. His more traditional works are generated by a process of daily interactions with his mid to large scale canvases, using brushes to build up, erase, and rework layers of gestural, exuberant marks. For his more experimental works, Bauer pulls from what he calls his “image bank” of Photoshop files. Using his computer, he crafts these images into an arrangement, which he then screen-prints in layers onto the canvas; creating works situated tantalizingly between the digital and the handmade.

While John Bauer’s canvasses, as large as 90 x 102 inches, contain hints of abstract expressionism, his creative process marries digital manipulation with traditional stenciling, spraying, rolling, brushing and printing, much of the hand work influenced by German post-war painting.

JOHN BAUER, Nautilus, 2016; Oil and enamel on linen; 57 × 45 in (144.8 × 114.3 cm)

John Bauer (b. 1971 San Diego, California) received a BA in Studio Art in 1993 from the University of California in Santa Barbara, California. Selected solo exhibitions include: Perry Rubenstein Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2013); Patricia Low Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland (2010); Galleri SE, Bergen, Norway (2009); Gallery Van Bau, Vestfossen, Norway (2009); Maruani & Noirhomme, Knokke, Belgium (2008); solo presentation Art Brussels with Patricia Low Contemporary, Brussels, Belgium (2008); Patricia Low Contemporary in Gstaad, Switzerland (2007); John Bauer at Bellwether Gallery in New York (2007); Free-Floating Anxiety at Bellwether Gallery in New York (2003); and New Oils at Clementine Gallery in New York (1998).

Selected group exhibitions include Abstract America: New Art from the US, Saatchi Gallery, London, England (2009); New York’s Finest at Canada Gallery in New York (2005); Grotto II at Jessica Murray Projects in Brooklyn (2004); and Hello Chelsea at Bellwether Gallery in New York. He is represented by Patricia Low Contemporary, Switzerland. John Bauer lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

If you would like to have a Special Private Viewing of this exclusive online exhibition by this very exciting and telented artists, please take a look on our ARTSY website now and you can review everything available at this time. To view this work, go to the following special link I have set up for you:

https://www.artsy.net/mark-moore-gallery/shows

For more information on this artist and the Mark Moore Fine Art program please check out our website: www.markmoorefineart.com

You can find additional available works by this artist and prices on our ARTSY website: www.artsy.net/mark-moore-gallery

Please note that all work is available subject to prior sale and prices are subject to change without notice. All taxes, tariffs, shipping and/or viewing expenses, if any, would be additional.

#markmoorefineart #johnbauer

Image: JULIE HEFFERNAN, Self Portrait as Luminous Body, 2004

Check out the essay on the work of Julie Heffernan titled “A Call to Action” by Kelli Scott Kelly on ARTSY at: 

https://www.artsy.net/mark-moore-gallery/article/mark-moore-fine-art-call-action-kelli-scott-kelley-julie-heffernan

Kelli Scott Kelley is a professor of painting at Louisiana State University. Kelley received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She authored a book featuring her narrative artwork, entitled Accalia and the Swamp Monster, in 2014. Her work as been exhibited both nationally and internationally is featured in the permanent collections of the LSU Museum of Art, Tyler Museum of Art, and the Eugenia Summer Gallery.

This essay appears in the exhibition catalogue, When the Water Rises: Recent Paintings by Julie Heffernan, to accompany a exhibition of Heffernan’s work organized by the LSU Museum of Art with LSU School of Art and LSU College of Art + Design. When the Water Rises will travel to several venues through early 2019. More information can be found at: http://www.lsumoa.org/julie-heffernan/

Julie Heffernan (b. 1956, Illinois) received her MFA from Yale School of Art (CT), and has been exhibiting widely for the past two decades. Selected exhibitions include those at The Korean Biennial (Korea), Weatherspoon Art Gallery (NC), Tampa Museum Of Art (FL), Knoxville Museum Of Art (TN), Columbia Museum Of Art (SC), Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), The New Museum (NY), The Norton Museum (FL), The American Academy Of Arts And Letters (NY), Kohler Arts Center (WI), The Palmer Museum Of Art (PA), National Academy Of Art (NY), Mcnay Art Museum (TX), Herter Art Gallery (MA), Mint Museum (NC) and Virginia Museum of Fine Art (VA), Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OK) among numerous others. Her work has also been acquired by many of the institutions listed above.

#markmoorefineart #julieheffernan

Image: Mark Bennett, Town of Mayberry, 1997 / Mark Moore Fine Art

ON VIEW NOW: “Mark Bennett: Dream Houses – The Blueprint Drawings 1992-2017” – an exclusive online ARTSY exhibition focusing on the Mark Bennett unique original “SitCom” drawings of the last two decades just recently released from the artist studio. This presentation ends on September 25th.

You can view this exclusive ARTSY online exhibition of these works now by clicking on the follwing link below:

https://www.artsy.net/show/mark-moore-fine-art-mark-bennett-dream-houses-the-blueprint-drawings-1992-2017

For additional information on this work or this artist please visit the website at www.markmoorefineart.com or contact Mark Moore Fine Art at: info@markmoorefineart.com

#markmoorefineart #markbennett

Yoram Wolberger, TROPHY #2 (Baseball), 2017; Cast and Polished Stainless Steel; 78 x 36 x 36 inches (approximate dimensions); Edition of 3 (+ 2 Artist Proofs) – Price Upon Request

Mark Moore Fine Art is pleased to announce the release of a new major sculpture work by MMFA artist YORAM WOLBERGER on September 7, 2017.

Yoram Wolberger uses childhood toys and everyday domestic items to create his large scale sculptures, foregrounding the latent symbolism and cultural paradigms of these objects that so subtly inform Western culture. By enlarging this ephemera to life size, Wolberger emphasizes the distortions of their original manufacture disallowing any real illusion and conceptually forcing the viewer to reconsider their meanings. When enlarged beyond any possibility of dismissal, we see that toy soldiers create lines between Us and Them, plastic cowboys and Indians marginalize and stereotype the Other, even wedding cake bride and groom figurines dictate our expected gender roles.

The artist has just finished a major new work in his series of TROPHY TOPPER sculptures that he began in 2008. Please note that Edition 1/3 and 2/3 have already been sold in each of these editions. The artist still has one example that remains available in the edition of three, as does one Artist Proof.

As the artist states:

My art manipulates and challenges our perceptions of the familiar through a variety of sculptural interventions. I often choose to work with everyday, culturally iconic, objects to which we attach deep-seated and often unconscious meanings. Transformed beyond their expected context, these evolved objects suggest new associations and provoke fresh insights into their larger meaning and relevance.

For this project, I am interested in examining the contrast between the symbolic and the material dimensions of what I refer to as “common sports trophies”. Specifically, these are the small silver or gold-colored figurines typically awarded in recreational sport. With their idealized figures, such trophies are awarded to represent essential qualities of greatness in a participant. As cultural artifacts, however, our common trophies epitomize values that are intrinsic not only to sport, but to American society and community as well.

In the archaeology of American cultural artifacts, common sports trophies are fitting symbols of personal achievement within a democratic society. Cast from non-precious materials to shine like silver and gold, they are at once common objects and personal treasures. Originally reserved for champions, they are now often awarded to recreational players in honor of a variety of achievements other than victory, including participation.

My intention is to design and construct life-size figurines, standing between 6 and 8 feet tall and meticulously replicating the smaller versions found on common sports trophies. Fabricated from stainless steel casts and polished to a chrome-like finish, they will magnify the humble grandeur of the familiar shiny figurines while exposing the typical casting seams, mass-production flaws and design shortcuts that normally escape our attention. Enlarged 20 times beyond their original size, the trophies’ imperfections become relevant and, it is my hope, intriguing.

For some, the sculptures will evoke personal memories, inspiring moments and achievements. For some, they will stand as noble monuments of the American Dream. And for others still, the contrast between the figures’ idealized poses and their structural imperfections, will provoke deeper contemplation of our cultures values of competition, achievement and the risks that accompany the rise to fame.

Yoram Wolberger (b. 1963, Tel Aviv, Israel) earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute’s (CA) New Genres Department. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and has been featured in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), deCordova Sculpture Park (MA), the Aldrich Contemporary Museum (CT), Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Museum of Contemporary Art (IL) and the Israeli Museum of Modern Art (Israel) among others. His works have been acquired for the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (CA), the Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California Riverside (CA) and the McNay Art Museum (TX). The artist lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

For more information on this upcoming release and availability, please contact Mark Moore at: mark@markmoorefineart.com

#markmoorefineart #yoramwolberger

Jason Salavon’s work “Rainbow Aggregator” (detail image below) will be featured in the upcoming show titled “Drawn from a Score” at the Beall Center for Art + TechnologyBat the University of California Irvine.