Creative Current

Interviews with Los Angeles artists, actors and musicians.

Mark Dutcher

Mark Dutcher defends his position as one of the most prolific and fearless painters working in LA today. Let’s say painter because, although he makes forays into sculpture, installation, curation, and even sometimes performance and text-based gestures, painting is at the core of all he does. Throughout the years, he has frequently renovated his painting style with each new exhibition; for example his densely decorated domestic memory-cabinet paintings, which then transformed into a distilled chromatic abstraction that managed to retain emotion in the absence of imagery, plus a series of exuberant sculptural work that culled motifs and shapes from the paintings. He once ran a gallery that existed entirely in thematically curated envelope editions; and a series of subversive, one-night motel art fairs that helped energize a flagging local scene. he is known equally for for intricate and enormous painted tableaux evoking curio cabinets and debris-strewn rag-rugs and for giant gold-glitter, pennants, and confetti bombs. For a recent show in NYC he executed a series of mesmerizing, maximalist and illegible text-festooned color fields. With every series he seems to change the conversation, making breaks inspired by Guston in both style and radicalism. The result is a career of successive iterations of his aesthetic that speak to the overarching priority of his work — telling stories about what has been lost, and searching for a way to remember everything and everyone he has ever loved. One of the most interesting things about this serial reinvention is the thoughtfulness and personal bravery of his storytelling. But not only that; Dutcher is just as studious about his formalism as he is about his narrative symbolism. He has a knack for baring his soul and sparking a conversation about pictorial abstraction at the same time (sometimes literally, as his epic Facebook feeds attest). On the occasion of his first New York show in March of 2013, Shana Nys Dambrot spoke to the artist to retrace his steps and discuss the progressions of his work over the past 20 years, along the way unraveling the mystery of what holds it all together — the persistent awesomeness of Joy Division.

markdutcher.com
coagulacuratorial.com
facebook.com/markdutcher

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