Mark Hagen
15 Sep - 12 Nov 2011
MARK HAGEN
15 September - 12 November, 2011
Galeria Marta Cervera is pleased to present Mark Hagen’s first European solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptures. In TBAA subtle temporal disorientations are framed and contingencies foregrounded as physical entanglements mirror visual ones. For this show Hagen manipulates the materials of burlap, acrylic house paint, aluminum cans, and obsidian through numerous controlled and surrendered processes, serialization, and spatial disorientations to explore categorical slippages of value, history, and vision.
Central to the exhibition is a 200 unit "Subtractive and Additive" floor sculpture comprised of symmetrically staggered rows of sandblasted aluminum beer cans, each filled with exactly 75 ml of Los Angeles rain water, collected from buckets outside the artist's studio. This amount of liquid allows the cans to precariously balance on their edges. Here Hagen has appropriated industrial design and consumer packaging to create a mesmerizing piece that conjures the condensation cubes of Hans Haacke, Arte Povera's process works, minimalist metal floor sculptures, close-up magic, and Philip Johnson's so-called "Puerta de Europa" buildings. Row by row they suggest strata and a “dust-like” incremental accumulation (even as their content evaporates molecule by molecule), while the overall pattern implies the possibility of infinite expansion without suggesting a sense of incompletion.
The exhibition will also include new acrylic on burlap “Additive" paintings that unsettle common relationships between paint, canvas, and viewer. Using essentially a mold-making process and shapes derived from specific symmetrical patterns, Hagen makes paintings which narrate the material circumstances of their manufacture. For these Hagen first leaves burlap “grounds” casually folded and piled outdoors for several months while the Southern California sunlight “tans” the exposed areas. The result is that each layer leaves a record of itself on the sheets underneath, making each piece physically contingent on another, ultimately connecting them all. These grounds are then laid “face down” over plastic sheeting and packing tape and successive layers of acrylic exterior house paint are poured through the back into geometric shapes. The paint flows into the creases and folds of the underlying plastic, eventually making a mold of this substrata. When stretched and up-righted the layers of paint become out of chronological order in relationship to the viewer creating a subtly anachronistic object. Together the shapes form patterns which either continue into neighboring paintings or in sequences represent possible iterations through mirrorings and oppositions.
The anachronistic is further explored Hagen's “Subtractive and Additive" obsidian (volcanic glass) sculpture. For this piece Hagen has sliced a large rainbow obsidian boulder end to end, creating 11 plates of increasing and then decreasing size, imposing a geometry on them that is antithetical to their internal, amorphous structure. These plates are then polished to a mirror finish and then hung in sequence on an aluminum and steel, modular space-frame. The rearrangeable nature of plates as well as their support allows this piece to frame time and space while simultaneously allowing for its disorientation. Inspired by scrying mirrors, arrowhead displays, and tzompantlis (Mesoamerican skull racks), Hagen has created a sculpture that is seen as much as seen through or into, allowing and impairing vision, reflecting as well as becoming visually entangled with other objects and viewers in the room. Finally, Obsidian's deep historic use in culture, its inherent material ironies, and the fact that as a medium for sculpture it is essentially abandoned, are all invoked and embraced here with equal measure.
15 September - 12 November, 2011
Galeria Marta Cervera is pleased to present Mark Hagen’s first European solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptures. In TBAA subtle temporal disorientations are framed and contingencies foregrounded as physical entanglements mirror visual ones. For this show Hagen manipulates the materials of burlap, acrylic house paint, aluminum cans, and obsidian through numerous controlled and surrendered processes, serialization, and spatial disorientations to explore categorical slippages of value, history, and vision.
Central to the exhibition is a 200 unit "Subtractive and Additive" floor sculpture comprised of symmetrically staggered rows of sandblasted aluminum beer cans, each filled with exactly 75 ml of Los Angeles rain water, collected from buckets outside the artist's studio. This amount of liquid allows the cans to precariously balance on their edges. Here Hagen has appropriated industrial design and consumer packaging to create a mesmerizing piece that conjures the condensation cubes of Hans Haacke, Arte Povera's process works, minimalist metal floor sculptures, close-up magic, and Philip Johnson's so-called "Puerta de Europa" buildings. Row by row they suggest strata and a “dust-like” incremental accumulation (even as their content evaporates molecule by molecule), while the overall pattern implies the possibility of infinite expansion without suggesting a sense of incompletion.
The exhibition will also include new acrylic on burlap “Additive" paintings that unsettle common relationships between paint, canvas, and viewer. Using essentially a mold-making process and shapes derived from specific symmetrical patterns, Hagen makes paintings which narrate the material circumstances of their manufacture. For these Hagen first leaves burlap “grounds” casually folded and piled outdoors for several months while the Southern California sunlight “tans” the exposed areas. The result is that each layer leaves a record of itself on the sheets underneath, making each piece physically contingent on another, ultimately connecting them all. These grounds are then laid “face down” over plastic sheeting and packing tape and successive layers of acrylic exterior house paint are poured through the back into geometric shapes. The paint flows into the creases and folds of the underlying plastic, eventually making a mold of this substrata. When stretched and up-righted the layers of paint become out of chronological order in relationship to the viewer creating a subtly anachronistic object. Together the shapes form patterns which either continue into neighboring paintings or in sequences represent possible iterations through mirrorings and oppositions.
The anachronistic is further explored Hagen's “Subtractive and Additive" obsidian (volcanic glass) sculpture. For this piece Hagen has sliced a large rainbow obsidian boulder end to end, creating 11 plates of increasing and then decreasing size, imposing a geometry on them that is antithetical to their internal, amorphous structure. These plates are then polished to a mirror finish and then hung in sequence on an aluminum and steel, modular space-frame. The rearrangeable nature of plates as well as their support allows this piece to frame time and space while simultaneously allowing for its disorientation. Inspired by scrying mirrors, arrowhead displays, and tzompantlis (Mesoamerican skull racks), Hagen has created a sculpture that is seen as much as seen through or into, allowing and impairing vision, reflecting as well as becoming visually entangled with other objects and viewers in the room. Finally, Obsidian's deep historic use in culture, its inherent material ironies, and the fact that as a medium for sculpture it is essentially abandoned, are all invoked and embraced here with equal measure.