Mark Engel
Medium: Painting

Studio Location:
Silks Building - Studio# 214
37-24 24th Street

Website:: www.markengel.com

Artist Bio:
Mark Engel is a Brazilian-American artist. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1967, he currently lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA from Parsons School of Design in 1991. Mark's work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions since 1993 at such venues as MAR (Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Art in General (New York, NY), Centro Cultural Candido Mendes (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), University of North Texas (Denton, TX), and Austin Museum of Art (Austin, TX) among others. Mark has done extensive and pioneering creative work with digital paintings starting in 1995 as well as developed and organized new projects for emerging artists. His artwork deals with issues of abstraction vs. representation, contemporary art practices, art history and humor He has been critically praised in print by the New York Times, Jornal do Brasil, O Globo and other outlets. His work is included in private and institutional collections in Brazil, Europe and the United States.

Artist Statement:
My work is an exploration of digital media and techniques as a means to "painting" and the use of found photographs and objects as starting points in developing abstract imagery that allude to social and political commentary. I use the scanner as a camera and play with scale, distortion and context to develop new meanings. Integrating the use of computer-generated chance and manipulation allows me to introduce the unexpected and find new relationships between abstraction, representation and symbolism. The artworks start off as found images or scanned objects, which are digitally manipulated and printed as C-Prints mounted on Plexiglas.




All images and text copyright Mark Engel