Untitled #2259 Collage

When an artist of profound experience reaches a crossroads in his work, as Mark Sharp did at the beginning of this year, he immediately recognizes it. What is truly remarkable is how radically Sharp adapted his practice in response. Though it is clearly the same artistic sensibility that underpins the collaged pictures that Sharp has been making for the last several months, the shift in approach from his previous work affects the most basic principles of his art. While the earlier pictures were predicated upon invention, this new work is founded in discovery: whereas the carefully interlocking brushed ovoids in his previous pictures were conjured from Sharp’s interior reality, pictorial elements are now encountered in the physical materials from which the pictures are crafted. This is all the more apparent because these materials are drawn from realms beyond those we normally encounter in sophisticated abstract art. Alongside fabric painted in a whole range of ways, Sharp adds sections that are immediately identifiable as pieces cut and torn from towels, shirts, or blue jeans. This enhances the complexity of Sharp’s endeavor. His range of shapes explodes; rather than existing in purely pictorial space, their texture, their actual substance, and the layering one over another lend the paintings a literal depth. It is as though an entire history of remembered or phantom paintings exists beyond what we see. The landscape sources that informed even the most abstract of Sharp’s earlier paintings have disappeared; instead we find ourselves contemplating massive forms that compete for dominance in a painted expanse that escapes the constraints of gravity and where imagination and invention are given full rein. Mark Sharp has never imagined that paintings like these – that belong squarely in the tradition of modernist abstraction – can only be approached in a specific way that the artist dictates. Instead he seeks to offer his viewers as rich a range of interpretive choices as he can. It is no wonder that he is excited by this new work, for he now finds himself in a realm of aesthetic discovery perfectly suited to his temperament and his artistic ambitions.