Press release from the gallery:
The gallery "Am Landsgemeindeplatz" in Trogen, Switzerland is exhibiting the art of renowned artist Mark Staff Brandl. In the show, titled "Prelude," the paintings and sequential drawings displayed are a part of his PhD dissertation, currently in progress.
Mark Staff Brandl was born in 1955 near 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 Pacific 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, Sharkforum on-line, is Theory Editor for Chicago's Proximity, and is a Contributing Editor for New York's Art in America. 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 E.T.H. Graphic Collection in Zurich, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the International Museum of Cartoon Art, the Art Museum Olten and others.
Brandl is currently engaged in three series of artworks, titled , Covers and Riposte Paintings. The Panels are installations consisting of groups of paintings with additional painting directly on the wall, all of which combine to create several huge, walk-in comic pages. The Covers works are paintings which utilize the structure of comic-book covers, but not citations. The newest paintings 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.
In Trogen, Brandl is showing a selection of his recent work together with his "Collapsible Kunsthalle," a portable, action-figure-scaled exhibition space with installations in it by Brandl and French-Swiss artist Steve Litsios, which they originally exhibited the Art Museum in Neuchatel.
The exhibition is from February 21 through March 28. The Opening is on Friday, February 20, from 6 pm till 10 pm. The introductory speech is by Markus Landert, the director of the Art Museum of Thurgau.
www.art-trogen.ch
www.markstaffbrandl.com/
PRESS: High resolution images, press text in English and German, here.
Love it!
Love all of them!
sorry about the theft. I'm convinced it was a theft. I've been through the same thing. The museum in Vermont stored the best pages from my NightWings graphic novel. Other pages were there. but only the most elaborate were taken.
That was a decade ago and we still remember it. It rendered all the other pages worthless. I had the complete set.
So my heart goes out to you. But they can't steal your talent! You'll make more art, while the thief will deal with his lack of character one day.
Regards,
Gene
Hi Mark,
Man, that really sucks that someone stole your art from what is an art gallery!
It reminds me of something in my past. A couple and a half decades ago, a friend of mine (who shall go nameless, here) asked me to illustrate a piece of art on the topic of punk rockers for an article he was then writing, to be published, for Halifax's former long-running "Wednesday" magazine. I completed the art, and I had laboured long and hard on it; I was very, very proud of the piece!
The article was published that my friend wrote along with my accompanying piece of art with it!
Later, when I came to pick up the original art a few weeks later, my friend looked nervous & crest-fallen. "Phil", he said, "I don't know how to tell you this, but the art you did was stolen from the 'Wednesday office!"
I looked ashen. But what could I say?
Cut to: seventeen years later: I was over this same friend's house one day, 17 years later, and we were looking through his collection. I picked an art board up that was under some magazines, and I looked at it. It was my 'stolen' art for that article. I was stunned.
I turned it towards him.
He said, "ohhhhhhhhh.....yeah. About that. I,uhhh....liked it so much at the time, I decided to keep it. You, uhhh....you can have it back,now...."
To see this piece of art, go to the URL above,under my name & email address up the top, then click on 'files'. Then, scroll down & open the file header that says, 'Phil Latter's Art.'
Then, scroll down & open the one that says, 'Confessions of a Blood Punk.'
That's the one that that was stolen, that I got back, quite by accident, seventeen years later-!
Nice friend, huh? Aren't people wonderful?
Best Wishes,
Phil Latter
Canada
hey mark that top painting looks beautiful. and the series looks like it will be awesome.
i can see why people took your work.. ;)
please post more images will ya?
Thanks Ed. Do you mean the one with all the theorists' names on green with me and a theodoite, or the two faces in blue and red? You can click directly on the images here and see them larger too.