Mark Sheinkman: New Paintings
Lennon, Weinberg, New York
Through May 18, 2019
LENNON, WEINBERG
514 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.lennonweinberg.com
Lennon, Weinberg, New York
Through May 18, 2019
MARK SHEINKMAN
Montauk, 2019
18 x 14”, oil on linen
(c) Mark Sheinkman, Courtesy Lennon, Weinberg, New York
Mark Sheinkman’s paintings have long been characterized by sinuous linear marks, created by a subtractive technique of erasure through a layer of graphite and oil over a white ground. For quite some time, the gestures were relaxed, smoky and curvy, but the works in his first exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg in 2017 were dense with gestural activity, more layered, twisty, sometimes spiky, with more incidents of painterly, additive paint application.
His signature tonal gradation has now been upended by a return to color, an element he hasn’t used in a long time. But it is interesting in hindsight to look at certain paintings that had been in our 2017 show, and recognize that a significant evolution had already appeared on the horizon. Structures organized around tight bundles of lines, in works such as Hooper, have now been separated by color, testing the cohesiveness of the compositions. It’s good to push against the boundaries of our comfort zones and, to his credit, Mark Sheinkman has been doing exactly that.
The colors he has chosen for the new paintings are both nuanced and specific. A few of them, Forbell and Montauk for example, are largely monochromatic and therefore not so distant from the noncolored paintings that preceded them. Two other paintings, Hull and Cozine, are two-color blue and orange paintings with asymmetric compositions that entwine the complementary pairings into an unstable yet resolved dialogue. Hampton is an outlier in that color serves not only as the figure but also fills the ground, and the tiny Linwood is a lovely and spare capture of a single, continuous gesture over a pentimenti, a shadow of a painting behind.
In the other paintings in the show, including the largest, Hendrix, red, blue, yellow and orange gather in clusters over white grounds, with hazy atmospheres resulting from the layering of additive and subtractive processes. The compositions are equally considered and improvisatory, the gestural marks less sculpted and more forthrightly painted than in his previous works. Mark Sheinkman is a painter who has tended to adapt and advance within self-imposed restrictions. These paintings result from a welcome, if not inevitable, phase of an artist’s progress when it’s time to be less deliberative and just let it fly. The paintings in this show are evidence that by widening his horizon to include color, he has found a fertile direction for the future evolution of his distinctive work.
MARK SHEINKMAN
Hendrix, 2019
84 x 76”, oil on linen
(c) Mark Sheinkman, Courtesy Lennon, Weinberg, New York
MARK SHEINKMAN was born in New York in 1963 and received a B.A. from Princeton University. He began exhibiting his work in New York in 1989, and before long had solo shows at galleries in Houston, London and Belgium. In 1997, he began a long association with Von Lintel Gallery in Munich, later located in New York and Los Angeles where he has had three exhibitions since 2014. He also exhibits regularly at Steven Zevitas Gallery in Boston. He had solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri in 2005, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan in 2008 and the Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst, Otterndorf, Germany in 2009.
In recent years, his work has been included in group exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Crocker Museum in Sacramento and the Grand Rapids Art Museum.
His work is included in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Grand Rapids Museum of Art, the Harvard University Art Museum in Cambridge, Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, and the Weatherspoon Art Gallery in Greensboro, North Carolina.
LENNON, WEINBERG
514 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.lennonweinberg.com
