About
Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Mark Tansey. This much-anticipated show is his first major exhibition in New York since 1997.
This is the first time that the artist has painted in ultramarine blue, a color featured in all of the canvases on display. Large-scale and monochromatic, the paintings at first glance are reminiscent of snapshots of landscapes.
Upon closer examination, however, hidden imagery appears in unexpected places. The snowball in Snowman (2004) doubles as Karl Marx’s head, turned on its side; philosophers’ portraits, from Socrates to Ludwig Wittgenstein, emerge from the mountainside in West Face (2004); an anamorphic portrait of James Joyce is contained within the wake of a speeding boat in Wake (2003). In such paintings, figures and landscape are interchangeable as images merge and recede, only to reappear again. Contrary to Frank Stella’s famous statement “What you see is what you see,” in Tansey’s work, what you see is not necessarily what you see.
The dense imagery that permeates Tansey’s canvases can be sourced to a trove of visual material that the artist has collected over the years. This includes his own photographs, as well as clippings from magazines, journals, and newspapers. Tansey begins his creative process by stretching, rotating, or cropping forms, combining images and photocopying them over and over again until he produces a collage that can serve as preliminary study for his paintings.
Tansey’s work typifies the complexity of our age, when certainty seems more elusive than ever. In his paintings, it is difficult to determine whether east is west, up is down, left is right, or good is evil. The literal is the figurative, and the figurative is literal. Tansey embraces this ambiguity and invites the viewer to participate in a visual and metaphorical adventure.
A fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Roland Mönig will accompany the exhibition.
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Back to the Cave
Dorothy Spears writes on mountains and caves in the work of Mark Tansey, exploring themes of perception and process.
Transformations
A 1994 exhibition hosted by Mark Tansey in his New York apartment foregrounded a dynamic approach to realism taking shape on the margins of an art world preoccupied with conceptualism. On display were works by four Chinese artists—Chen Danqing, Ni Jun, Yu Hong, and Liu Xiaodong.
Painters without Borders
The exhibition Figurative Diaspora, cocurated by Mark Tansey and Peter Drake, presented paintings by five Chinese artists alongside work by six Russian artists, all of whom create “unofficial,” subversive, non-state-sanctioned art, thus tracing the influences of art across borders.
Figurative Diaspora
Curated by Mark Tansey and Peter Drake of the New York Academy of Art, Figurative Diaspora presents works of “unofficial art”—subversive, non-state sanctioned art—created by five Soviet artists and five contemporary Chinese artists.
Spotlight
Mark Tansey
Alexander Wolf guides us through a multilayered new painting by the celebrated artist.
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Artist Spotlight
Mark Tansey
April 19–25, 2023
Each of Mark Tansey’s paintings and drawings is a visual adventure that explores the nature of perception, meaning, and subjectivity. Working with the traditions of figurative and landscape painting, Tansey incorporates his expansive knowledge of history in layers of literary, philosophical, and mathematical references. Distortions of perspective and scale combine with his technical proficiency to complicate what it means to view and understand an image.
Photo: DPA Picture Alliance Archive/Alamy Stock Photo