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The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Tag: Mark Whalen

Blending two- and three-dimensional forms, Mark Whalen creates cerebral and absurd arrangements of the human body. Whether stacking vibrant heads or using sculpted hands to sculpt the very shapes of canvases, there’s a metatextual component in tackling the act of creating art itself.
Australian-born, Los Angeles-based painter Mark Whalen is known for works that exhibit both a dark humor and vibrancy, mirroring the duality of Western living. His current show, “Around the Bend,” fills Australia’s Chalk Horse Gallery with examples of this charge, with disparate, vague figures rendered in struggle.
Mark Whalen, covered here, is an Australian born artist living and working in Los Angeles known for his Greco-Roman inspired works. His pieces span resin-coated paintings to ceramic sculpture and pottery, which depict little geometric worlds inhabited by an unusual civilization. Whalen has described his images as "a bizarre version of life itself". Over the years, he became continually interested in portraying how humans interact with the spaces around them. Spatial theory is one of the themes of his upcoming exhibition "Trapezoid" at KP Projects/MKG in Los Angeles, opening Setember 12th.
This Saturday, Merry Karnowsky gallery will exhibit 17 new works from their roster with "Aggregate". The exhibition is part of the gallery's expansion as the KP Projects, here celebrating their collaboration with Zero+ Publishing. Curated by founder Kirk Pedersen, the show is a unique gathering that includes Andrew Hem, Edwin Ushiro, Augustine Kofie, Yumiko Kayukawa, Lisa Adams, Mercedes Helnwein, Blaine Fontana, and Dabs Myla, to name a few. Together, their paintings embody an adventurous spirit that is in tune with their editions, also on display.
Washington based artist Andrea Joyce Heimer classifies her work as "outsider art", or paintings of strange suburbia. Her solo exhibition at the Good Luck Gallery in Los Angeles, "Suburban Mythology: Volume 2", is a continuation of her main theme: every day dramas full of dark humor, based on real people and events in Heimer's life. Her simple and flat visual style recalls artists like Mark Whalen, Mel Kadel, or Deedee Cheriel, but this can be mis-leading. Heimer fills her scenes with personal symbolism.
Praeteritum Nunc Futurum. Translation: Past, present, and future. Tomorrow night, Merry Karnowsky gallery closes out the year with past and new works from their roster, serving as a preview of 2015. References to time can also be found, as in the Victorian subjects in Lezley Saar's piece, or Nicola Verlato's sweeping scene starring Kimbra in an old Western gone wrong. Preview after the jump!

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