Mark Tansey

born 1949

BiographyAmerican painter. He studied at the Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles (1969–72), and at Hunter College, New York (1974–8), where he majored in painting. Tansey became known in the late 1970s for figurative monochromatic paintings treated in a quasi-photographic manner. In those works he explored intellectual problems connected with the history of painting and critical theory with a wry, literalist humour. A Short History of Modernist Painting (oil on canvas, 1.83×1.83 m, 1979–80; Santa Monica, CA, Eli Broad Family Found.), shows a series of small scenes, mundane allegories of Modernist aesthetic discourse; in one instance Clement Greenberg’s edict of flatness is illustrated by means of a man with a garden roller. The figures in this and most other works are derived from a vast archive of magazine clippings that Tansey began to collect as a student.

Tansey’s engagement with critical debates was strongly influenced by structuralist and deconstructionist thought, resulting from the late 1980s in the inclusion of silkscreened text in works such as Close Reading (oil on canvas, 3.09×1.7 m, 1990; Fort Worth, TX, Mod. A. Mus.), which shows a climber scaling a rock; close inspection reveals the rock to be covered with text. Through such imagery Tansey alluded to the deconstructionist problematizing of reading and interpretation, as well as to the disinterested pleasure (likened to rock climbing) that may stimulate such intellectual sport. Alongside the questing individual, searching for meaning and truth, another common theme in Tansey’s work is that of the meeting or confrontation between things or people. His major work Triumph of the New York School (oil on canvas, 1.88×3.05 m, 1984; New York, Whitney) uses a military metaphor to frame an allegory of the passing of the avant-garde leadership from Paris to New York in the mid-20th century. Based on Velázquez’s Surrender of Breda (1635), this work depicts the theoretician of surrealism, André Breton, in World War I uniform, signing a document of surrender witnessed by Clement Greenberg, dressed in World War II uniform. Other key figures such as Picasso and Jackson Pollock, in military attire, are cast in a manner suggesting the American supercession. In a series of drawings exhibited at the Curt Marcus Gallery, New York, in 2000, Tansey forewent much of the drama of his previous work, focusing instead on the idea of empirical investigation of the world; the drawing Imprinting (graphite and oil on gessoed paper, 2000) shows a woman bending to press her hand into earth that bears the imprint of fossil forms.

Source: Mark Tansey (exh. cat., essays A. Robbe-Grillet and M. Tansey, Los Angeles, CA, Co. Mus. A., 1993) from Oxford Art Online
http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T097100?q=mark+tansey&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit

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