AL’S OFFICE

MARK VAN WAGNER

On view: March 17 - April 22, 2022

View Exhibition

In combining movement with stillness, Mark Van Wagner’s artworks reference and combine various archeological, architectural, anthropomorphic characteristics, and various investigations of the inner and outer landscape. His sculptures and paintings often depict moments of impact and reverberations of force. The implications of conflict and destruction are present but so are humor and restoration, providing a sense of intimacy and introspection for the embodied subject.

Over the years, Van Wagner has collected natural and pigmented sands from around the world, incorporating this substance into his layered-relief paintings and sculptures. In the exploration of applying mixed-media/assemblage into his artwork, he has recognized sand to be the most literal medium to capture material decomposition - its essence defining impermanence related to time, place and gross matter. Thick and thin spontaneous-gestural applications of glue adhesives and primers are sprinkled with innumerable sand particles and flotsam that simultaneously mimic a pointilist-pixelationist approach. By mending and reassembling the sand back into a concrete substance onto his canvases and cardboard boxes his work playfully reminds us of life’s cycles.

Van Wagner cites art povera, dada, and folk art as some of his major art movement influences.

Mark Van Wagner received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied Art History and Urban planning at Colorado College. He has exhibited in numerous venues across the U.S. including the Long Island Biennial at the Heckscher Museum (Huntington, NY), 325 Project Space (Queens, NY), Marquee Projects (Bellport, NY), Providence Art Center (Providence, RI), Proto Gallery (Hoboken, NJ), Jamestown Art Center (Jamestown, RI), Elisa Contemporary Art (Riverdale, NY), and Nancy Lurie Gallery (Chicago, IL). He has also exhibited at Art Hamptons (Bridgehampton, NY) and Affordable Art Fair (New York, NY). His media coverage includes articles in Artnet.com, Artsy.net, Artdaily.org, HamptonsArtHub.com, The Long Island Advance, the Chicago Tribune, Boulder Daily Camera and NPR radio, among others. His work is included in many private and public collections throughout the United States and Europe including the Rockford Art Museum (Rockford, IL), Capital One Corporate Collection (Melville, New York), The Weill Cornell Medical Center (New York, NY) and the Sunneziel Meggen Corporate Collection (Meggen, Switzerland). The artist currently lives and works on Long Island in the village of Bellport, NY. His deconstructive abstract paintings and sculptures are made of natural and pigmented sands that poignantly remind us of life’s cycles and the bridge between man and nature.