MARK ROSENTHAL
Paintings
Collage
When Covid hit and the lockdown began, I was overwhelmed. I was anxious as never before about dying -- given my history of respiratory issues -- not to mention the climate, politics, and the future, my future. A breakthrough came in painting to match the moment as I struggled to work with super wet and thick paint. I experimented with a bunch of new techniques including a type of blotting with newspaper. Though almost uncontrollable, these experiments worked out and I saved the newspaper monoprints. In May I started making collages using these byproducts of my painting process, by cutting and gluing them on sheets of Sintra, a sign-making material. I like that intermediary shapes, images and the actual paint from my paintings are reused in another form. The paintings are done quickly and intuitively, imagining structure on the fly, all at once, while the collages are organized slowly and meticulously, though with a respect for inherent disorder. It is a meditation on structure and entropy. Welcome to my world.
Mark Rosenthal went to both Cooper Union and NYU Film School. He has worked as a medical Illustrator, taught art to kids, operated his own art school, co-curated shows including Unwanted Figures of the Imagination, and exhibited in Brooklyn and Manhattan.