PERSISTENT COVER
Mark Ostapchuck
Form + Content presents an exhibition of new paintings by Mark Ostapchuk
Summerish, 2023, Oil on wood panel, 12” x 24”
October 26 – November 29, 2023
Opening Reception
Saturday, October 28, 6:30 – 8:00 pm
Description
Form and Content Gallery presents Persistent Cover, new oil and acrylic and watercolor paintings by Mark Ostapchuk. Mark Ostapchuk’s current paintings feature a persistent and obsessive manner of applied covering and sanding and rebuilding opaque and translucent surfaces. These paintings introduce simple patterns and shapes encountered in everyday domestic life. Within these pictures, shapes and patterns in space, suggest characters in situations and places.
Artist Biography
Ledger, 2023, Acrylic on tobacco cloth on tempered board, 20” x 38”
Mark Ostapchuk lives and works in Minneapolis. He has shown in the Minneapolis College of Art and Design Gallery, University of Minnesota Gallery (now Weisman Art Museum), Soap Factory (Minneapolis), Phipps Center for the Arts and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Mark Ostapchuk received his MFA in drawing and painting from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His awards include a 1992 and 2023 McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowship.
Artist Statement
My visual work often is marked by bright colors, obsessive patterns and a willingness to revise and build up layers of of paint. I suppose the fondness I developed many years ago, for Matisse’s tight compositions and elegant color arrangement still gives me clues about how to play out my own drawings and paintings. Apart from looking at other artists for influences, I like I like the shapes I encounter in everyday domestic life. For example, playing card club shapes and those decorative scallops of 1960s suburban house millwork find themselves in my drawings and paintings. I also especially like the ways jazz singers interpret and improvise standard songs into the most personal statements. I like to think that drawings and paintings share jazz music’s possibilities to point out something poignant in what first might seem cliché.
upcoming shows
/some-body-copy
Salt Crown, 2023, oil on wood board, 30” x 32 1/2”
More Bad Guests, 2023, oil on board, 18” x 26”
Mark Ostapchuk is a recipient of a 2023 MCAD McKnight Fine Arts Fellowship