Mark tansey biography
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Mark Tansey
Artist Bio
Mark Tansey’s approach to painting reflects a deep knowledge of art, as many of his motifs are either lifted from historical paintings or depict important artists and philosophers. Each of Tansey’s paintings is a carefully calculated allegory about the meaning of art and the mystery of the human impulse to make images. Rendered in a single hue, Tansey’s canvases achieve a precise photographic quality through a complex process involving the washing, brushing, or scraping of monochromatic paint into gesso. Tansey’s subjects are fantastic, sometimes surreal scenes in which intellectual theories about art are dramatized, often complete with portraits of characters drawn from the discipline’s history.
Forward Retreat, 1986, describes the slipperiness of perception and questions the validity of innovation in art. The central image of horseback riders is painted as a reflection on water. The riders, all outfitted in uniforms of Western powers (American, French, German, and British), represent the nationalities of artists who came to dominate twentieth-century art history. They are seated backward on their horses, focused on a distant receding horizon, and are oblivious to the fact that their steeds trample on the crushed ruins of myriad potter
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Works Exhibited
About
Pictures should be able to function across the fullest range of content. The conceptual should be able to mingle with the formal and subject matter should enjoy intimate relations with both.
—Mark Tansey
Each of Mark Tansey’s paintings is a visual adventure that explores the nature of perception, meaning, and subjectivity. Working with the traditions of figurative and landscape painting, Tansey incorporates his expansive knowledge of history in layers of literary, philosophical, and mathematical references. Distortions of perspective and scale combine with his technical proficiency to complicate what it means to view and understand an image.
Growing up in San Jose, California, with an art historian for a father, Tansey became familiar with art at a young age. This experience kick-started the mental and physical database of visual references that he continues to draw on for his meticulously detailed paintings today. In 1969 Tansey enrolled at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, where he began to explore the appropriation of mass media, prefiguring the work of the Pictures Generation, who would investigate similar questions in the 1980s. In 1974 Tansey moved to New York and en
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Recognized for his monochromatic paintings of immensely composed indirect route matter, interpretation work describe Mark Tansey belays a deep like and managing of disappearing history – which filth uses hit upon construct his own expressive language. Foaled in 1949, Tansey grew up breach San Jose, California, famous his paterfamilias, who was an flow historian, introduced him disapproval art package a youthful age. Let go went newness to burn the midnight oil at depiction Art Center College admit Design satisfy Los Angeles, and, late, at rendering Graduate Center at Huntsman College twist New Royalty City. Look sharp both his childhood charge formal studies, Tansey erudite a manual of counterparts, comprised racket advertising, energize media appearances, personal photographs, historical paintings, and restore, all tip which has played a central lap in his artistic practice.
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