Mark Flood

A versatile and reactionary artist, Mark Flood was originally renowned for his ‘lace paintings’ series, an unabashed exploration of beauty with rich, textural layers of paint and decorative lace, and most recently lauded for curating a highly-acclaimed, not-for-sale exhibition of Houston artists in New York City. His most compelling body of work, however, comprises large scale paintings and collages that playfully subvert the vocabulary and peculiarities of our image-saturated zeitgeist: an overblown, pixelated Youtube logo, a contact sheet of spiderman memes, a painting of the words ‘Another Painting’. Flood may very well be a champion of a ‘Pop Art’ that is more befitting of today’s cultural climate. Appropriating corporate logos, internet memes, advertisements, pornography and a self-conscious irony typical of postmodern humour, his diverse oeuvre most scathingly criticises and encapsulates contemporary states of alienation and nihilism.

Born in Houston, Texas in 1957, Flood had been working in relative obscurity in his hometown while steadily rising to the forefront of the American art scene. A recipient of the Engelhard Award in 1991, his work can be found in prominent collections in Texas, namely the Dallas Museum of Art; Menil Collection, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Flood has exhibited extensively in solo and group shows, at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Autocentre Contemporary Art, Berlin; American Academy, Rome; 6 Fitzroy Square, London; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; San Antonio Museum of Art; Centre for Contemporary Art Andratx, Mallorca; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; and Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City. The artist lives and works in Houston, Texas.

Image: Courtesy by the Artist Mark Flood