LACMA Tar Pit

Details

Mark Flood (B. 1957)
LACMA Tar Pit
acrylic on canvas
38 1/8 x 28 1/8in. (96.8 x 71.4cm.)
Painted in 2012

Provenance

Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

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Lot Essay

An agent provocateur and enfant terrible, a painter and a mischief-maker, Mark Flood is known for his violent intelligence and wry wit, an artist made up of one half punk-propaganda master and one half elegant lace painter. Using acid, venomous colors and clashing combinations, Flood’s paintings are formed from paint soaked lace pressed against a canvas, showing the age and wear endured by the battered lace before its last incarnation in printmaking. Empty of irony, the LACMA Tar Pit has a formal beauty that transcends Flood’s earlier oeuvre; however it is still quite adamantly able to deliver a punch in the gut to traditional heroic notions of painting. Flood suggests that his shift in style is in part due to critic Dave Hickey’s 1993 book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. ‘Hickey made me realize that I made ugly art,’ says Flood, ‘But that’s what I thought art was about—if you made something beautiful, you were suspect. … When I discovered how to make something beautiful, I no longer needed any art bureaucracy.’
(M. Flood, https://martywalkergallery.com/artists/markflood/artist-page.html [accessed 15th August 2014]).

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