Mark Greenwold: A Moment of True Feeling 1997-2007
Oct 10 – Nov 10, 2007
Frequently painful in subject matter but fairy-tale-like in atmosphere, unusually small in size yet monumental in their feeling for composition, imbued with a psychoanalytical way of looking at experience and accompanied by the most literary of titles yet driven by the physically painstaking effort of giving every square inch of a painting's surface precisely the same density of texture as every other, Mark Greenwold's pictures are among the most stimulatingly contradictory in contemporary art. -Sanford Schwartz
DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Mark Greenwold: A Moment of True Feeling, the long awaited ten-year exhibition of Greenwold's work, gathering together all thirteen paintings and five studies the artist has produced during the past decade.
Greenwold's deliberate and meticulous technique has always been a key aspect of his work. Laboring intensively over every image, it can take Greenwold up to a year to complete a painting. Critic Sanford Schwartz has written, “While some artists work slowly because they are methodical and painstaking, others work slowly because their art appears to cast a spell over them.” Greenwold himself has observed that he works “like an anteater, devoted to the small patch of ground in front of me; endlessly doubling back, until I get it right.”
Greenwold has had only eight solo exhibitions since 1979, two of which contained only one painting. His 1995 mid-career retrospective Mark Greenwold: The Odious Facts - Paintings 1975-1995 contained a mere twenty-seven paintings, virtually every mature work the artist had produced up until that time.
Working largely on an intuitive level, Greenwold begins each painting by “getting excited about an idea, a cast of characters and a space.” The resulting works are multi-faceted explorations of the issues and complexities of life: grown-up lives, grown-up bodies, and grown-up feelings about love and loss. The cast of characters, though derived from people in Greenwold’s life, are often assigned roles that do not necessarily correspond with reality. Throughout his career, Greenwold has insisted on multiple interpretations of his disturbing and riveting images, most of which defy any simple literal interpretation. Of his subject matter, Greenwold insists, “Artists ought to have the right to offend...I’ve always been interested in strong, difficult content -- capable of arousing real misunderstandings.”
Mark Greenwold was born in 1942 in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from Indiana University. Greenwold's work has been seen in a number of group exhibitions, including Disparities and Deformations, Our Grotesque, SITE Santa Fe's 5th International Biennial Exhibition in 2004, curated by Robert Storr. Greenwold has also curated several exhibitions, including Endless Love at DC Moore Gallery in 2004 and The Risk of Existence at Phyllis Kind Gallery in 1998. Greenwold has been the recipient of a number of awards, including a National Endowment for the Art Grant in 1985, the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome in 1987, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in 1987 and 1994, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 1991, and most recently a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Francis J. Greenburger Foundation in 2001. His work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The National Academy Museum, and Colby College Museum of Art.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 64-page catalogue with an essay by Sanford Schwartz and a self-interview by the artist.