MARK BRENNAN AND ABRAHAM STORER
SURFACES
On Exhibit: October 1 - October 13
Opening Reception:
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
Surfaces brings together the artwork of Mark Brennan and Abraham Storer.
Mark Brennan presents his Space in a Box paintings. Measuring about a foot square, the pictures are extremely detailed oil paintings of the ocean. They portray the water and the sky in various weather conditions and times of day. The paintings, all on paper, are framed in deep wooden boxes. The boxes are made by the artist with assistance from woodworker Robert Mason in Brooklyn and are distressed, often with antique iron hardware, to evoke the wear and tear of the passage of time.
Abraham Storer lived for nine years in Israel, most of it in Jerusalem. During that time, he produced the Soil and Sky pictures, diptychs comprised of two identical panels. One is painted in atmospheric pastel tones suggestive of the sky. The other is an assemblage of rock and dirt. In each piece, the earth is taken from a specific place of historic or spiritual significance, which he gathered on site and glued to the panel. The works are titled after the location of the earthen matter.
Both artists are residents of Cape Cod, Massachusetts now and continue to draw spiritual inspiration from the natural environment around them. These two bodies of work share a strong affinity for each other: both series present a strong dichotomy between two near polar forces. One can easily infer a dialog between the immediate physical or earth bound nature of one element and the ethereal or spiritual nature of its opposite. In Brennan’s case, it is the vast expanse of the water trapped in the distressed wooden box like a soul encased in a body. With Storer, the two elements, the physicality of the soil and the celestial atmosphere of the painted half, appear as a side by side couple.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
Mark Brennan lives in Brooklyn, New York and Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Mass. Stylistically he owes a debt to traditional East Asian painting in his elongated watercolors. His small pictures encased in boxes have affinities with an array of distinctly American artists; one can draw references to William Trost Richards, Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett, to William Harnett and John Peto, Georgia O’Keeffe, Joseph Cornell and Vija Celmins. Like the early Hudson River School and many 20th Century abstract artists, he unapologetically experiments with altruistic and transcendent functions for art, both in his work and in his curatorial enterprises.
In the 1980s he participated in the florid East Village art scene while working for Andy Warhol in the Interview circulation department. Shortly before Warhol’s death, he suddenly abandoned both relationships to travel North America, living in the back of a station wagon. Upon his return to New York, he began teaching public school in District 9 (the poorest congressional district in the country) in the Bronx. A weekend activity, painting, gradually expanded into an avocation.
Recent projects include a solo show of his Space in a Box paintings at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture and Islamic Art/Christian Space (curator) at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, both in Manhattan, attempting to build bridges between two seemingly irreconcilable parties. The latter exhibit was the first ever show of Islamic artwork in an active Christian place of worship. He is a member of Openings Artists Collective in New York. On Cape Cod he showed his work at the Off Main Gallery in Wellfleet.
Abraham Storer strives to make paintings that appear simple and straight-forward, yet resonate with mystery and feeling. His landscape paintings depict observations of specific places around the world where he has lived and traveled, including Poland, Israel, New York and Cape Cod. Through the process of painting, he records external conditions, like weather and light, and the subjective sensibilities of his own thoughts, emotions, and spirituality.
His visual language uses flattened abstract shapes and emptiness to counter the deep, atmospheric space of the landscape. He facilitates between loose painterly gestures and more realistic rendering, allowing the paint to exist as both material and illusion, while his imagery depicts a landscape with abundant natural beauty yet impinged upon by human interventions. These tensions coalesce around a central concern about the relationship between materiality and transcendence.
Storer currently lives in Wellfleet, MA with his family. He has an MFA from Boston University, a BA from Brandeis University and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Farm Projects (Wellfleet, MA) and Caldbeck Gallery (Rockland, ME). Honors include a Fulbright Fellowship to Israel and a residency through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on Governor’s Island in New York Harbor.