Hey all Sharks and Shark readers! I’m coming to Chicago from Europe, but only very quickly. I’ll be there from Wednesday, April 25th through Monday, April 30th. I’ll be in the Artists Project part of the Art Fair, actually in a building next to the Merchandise Mart, every day from and then at events and so on at night. Please come visit me there, as I would love to see everyone I know, as well as anyone who enjoy my Shark posts and even those who dislike my posts. Please drop by my booth and/or contact me through the artist Wesley Kimler, with whom I’m staying.
The hours of the show, when I’ll be at the booth or nearby, are:
Show Hours
Preview Party —Thursday, April 26, 7–10 p.m.
Friday, April 27, 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
Saturday, April 28, 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
Sunday, April 29, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
Monday, April 30, 11 a.m.–4 p.m.
The Shark’s adress is:
Wesley Kimler
2046 W. Carroll
Chicago, IL
USA 60612
+1 312 942 9078
Here is a self-aggrandizing press release.
Mark Staff Brandl in Solo Show at the Chicago Art Fair
Press Release
Artist Mark Staff Brandl will be featured in a solo show of paintings in a booth in the Artist Project section of the upcoming Chicago Art Fair from April 27-30, 2007. Brandl is one of only 50 established and emerging fine artists worldwide to be selected to be featured in a "Statements"-like solo presentation during this prestigious fair. The Artist Project will debut with a special Preview Night Celebration on Thursday, April 26, 2007 and will be presented at 350 West Mart Center Drive, as part of Art Chicago at the world-famous Merchandise Mart in Chicago.
America’s longest running international contemporary and modern art fair, Art Chicago 2007 continues a 20-year legacy as one of world’s most important art events, making its new home at The Merchandise Mart. The citywide celebration of arts and culture with Art Chicago as its centerpiece is expected to attract well over 30,000 visitors. In addition to the fair and the Artist Project, educational programs, guided tours, music, theatre and dance performances are planned at a variety of venues throughout the city: from major museums to small galleries, from world-class concert halls to cutting-edge clubs, from lakefront parks to exclusive private parties.
Mark Staff Brandl was born in 1955 in Illinois. The artist began his art career in Chicago, where he lived for many years. He has lived primarily in Switzerland since 1988. He studied art, art history, literature and literary theory at the University of Illinois, Illinois State University, Columbia Pac University, and is currently working on a Ph.D. at the University of Zurich.
Brandl is active internationally as an artist since 1980, has won various awards, had many publications and had numerous exhibitions. His shows include galleries and museums in the US, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Egypt, the Caribbean; specific cities include Paris, Moscow, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. As a critic, he is a frequent contributor to London’s The Art Book and is a Contributing Editor for New York’s Art in America. He is also the curator of The Collapsible Kunsthalle. Works of his have been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, The Whitney Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the St. Gallen Art Museum, The Thurgau Museum of Fine Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the International Museum of Cartoon Art, the Art Museum Olten and others.
The Artist Project exhibition will feature large and small paintings by Brandl. Additionally a wall-painting installation will be presented at Sharkforum's Sharkpit exhibition space concurrent with the fair. Brandl will be showing a group of Covers paintings as well as two new, large Dripped Portrait and Portrait and a Character paintings. In these works, the artist revels in his inspirational sources, especially those from his childhood that initially called him to be an artist. These include the billboard sign-painting and display-window decoration of his father and mother, as well as references to superhero comics and their artists.
The Covers works utilize the structure of comic book covers, with titles, bold lettering, prices, dates, numbering, and so on. Nevertheless, Brandl does not simply appropriate an image, as did Pop artists. Rather, he engages this form as an inherited yet incomplete grammar, coaxing it to proclaim celebrations and complaints, desires and critical thoughts. The two newest paintings merge inspiration from Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Jacopo Tintoretto and superhero artist Gene Colan, appearing to be fashioned of drips of sign-painters enamel, their strokes and lines mutate into representations of themselves. Expressively abstract swirls of lines seemingly drawn with a rapier mutate into Pop images of fluidly-drawn faces when viewed at a distance.
Brandl’s art declares how a new, robust form of painting can absorb influences and innovations of other genres, reframing them within its own visual thought processes. His work is intellectual and conceptual, yet entertainingly sensual. It is eloquent fine art , yet forceful like popular culture. For Brandl this is not fusion or cross-over, but a personal and disjunctive dialogue of arbitration. Allusiveness and impurity are his aesthetic virtues.
Brandl website