Mark Dean Veca
Imbroglio

Project Room
Solo Exhibition

October 20, 2007 through November 17, 2007

NEW YORK, NY (October 2007) – Jonathan LeVine Gallery is pleased to announce Imbroglio, a solo exhibition by Mark Dean Veca. This will be the artist's first solo show at Jonathan LeVine Gallery and his most ambitious New York exhibition to date. For Imbroglio, Veca presents 17 new paintings on panel which will be incorporated into an all-encompassing installation.

In his latest body of work, Mark Dean Veca continues to explore the unification of opposing elements- high vs. low, elegant vs. vulgar, masculine vs. feminine, micro vs. macro, figure vs. ground, all with humor and playfulness. Using the French Rococo textile pattern known as Toile de Jouy as a compositional infrastructure, Veca improvises a phantasmagoria of pop iconography, cartoon abstraction, art history, biomorphic psychedelia, and sexual innuendo. John Belushi, Jimi Hendrix, and Colonel Klink mingle with Koons’s Rabbit, Tennessee Tuxedo and Viagra, while the Three Stooges schmooze with AC/DC over by the mushroom cloud. This overload of visual stimuli is finely rendered with brush and ink under the influence of Underground Comix, Phillip Guston, Mad Magazine, Franz Kline, and Dr. Seuss.

The resulting round and oval-shaped panels are then seamlessly integrated into a site-specific wall drawing where, as Carlo McCormick wrote of Veca’s previous installations, “confines create ideas, obstacles dictate illusions, and the proliferation of optic information ignites a kind of brain-searing explosion.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Mark Dean Veca was born in 1963 in Shreveport, Louisiana, and received his BFA in Painting at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been shown throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan at institutions such as PS1/MOMA, The Drawing Center, The Brooklyn Museum, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Reviews of Veca's work have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Juxtapoz, Artforum, Art in America, and Flash Art. He has received numerous awards including fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts in 1998 and 2002, as well as a grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 2006.