MARK SHEINKMAN:
New Paintings
March 3 - April 15, 2023
Public reception: March 3, 5:30 – 8 pm
Fleet, 2023, oil on linen, 108 x 152 inches
Steven Zevitas Gallery is pleased to present MARK SHEINKMAN: New Paintings, an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Mark Sheinkman. The exhibition comprises five large-scale color works and marks the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.
While the intimately scaled works exhibited in 2018 heralded Sheinkman’s return to color after an 18-year hiatus, the paintings included in New Paintings are a culmination of the artist’s pictorial language; they are a poetic amalgam, where a newly direct hand and fluid washes of color meet Sheinkman’s recognizable linear forms in a space that is suggestive of depth, yet resolutely flat.
Over the last three decades, Sheinkman has remained dedicated to a continued exploration of painting’s most basic elements and the weight of seemingly simple gestures. Oscillating between additive and reductive techniques, Sheinkman has always demonstrated a deep concern for and engagement with the process of painting. Many have attempted to link his linear forms to identifiable objects: a string of DNA, a knotted rope, an umbilical cord, but the content of Sheinkman’s paintings extends beyond our tangible reality and ultimately demand to be engaged with, not deciphered.
The experience of viewing these large works is perfectly captured in the following excerpt by writer and editor George Melrod:
They are notable for their elusive scale; encountering them, a viewer might feel they’ve entered another realm, of physical forces beyond our human gauge. In this aspect, Sheinkman harks back to the idea of abstraction as reducing form to the basic building blocks of existence: not geometry, but something no less essential – the active alchemy of organic form, the dynamic calligraphy of creation.
Sheinkman was born in New York in 1963 and received a B.A. from Princeton University. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. He has exhibited regularly in the United States and abroad, including solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids, Michigan; and the Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst, Otterndorf, Germany.
