Mark Yang

VSF is pleased to present Mark Yang’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and his second in our Los Angeles Space, Cryptic Aperture. In 2024 Yang began making paintings in pairs, not opposites or twins, but siblings and companions - compositions that emerge from a similar foundation and evolve into unique expressions of the same DNA. Yang’s signature figurative abstraction is on full display here, playing with deep and detailed looking at historical paintings and compositional strategies, Yang has built a body of work that arrives at an analysis of his understanding of the viewer’s perception of his own signature style.

Entropy (box), 2024 and Entropy (cylinder), 2024 make direct reference to a 1940 painting by Picasso, Woman Dressing Her Hair, which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Picasso’s painting is a portrait of Dora Maar, shown mostly from the front, her body tests the limits of the prescribed pictorial space, represented as an open-faced painted cube- a room, a stage. Her body, run through the metamorphosis of cubist perspective, twists to the right and is dramatically foreshortened, increasing the claustrophobic nature of the image. Rather than the languid awkwardness of the private toilette not performed for a male gaze, yet nonetheless observed and reveled in, by a painter like Dégas in his circa 1900 pastel, Women combing their hair, Picasso’s painting almost suggests the form of the body in motion locked inside a cube, like a sculpture yet to emerge from stone. Yang’s perspective (and many others’ as well) on Picasso’s work from this era is that the images reflect sculpture, or condensing what it is to look at three-dimensions in time into pictorial space - a sort of montage. In Yang’s pair of paintings, the palette and constraining cube of Woman Dressing Her Hair is repeated. However, each of Yang’s compositions use shapes reminiscent of the lower torso and legs, fused together, to suggest a more abstract form - a box or a cylinder - if these are paintings of sculptures, they are purely of Yang’s imagination, though clearly run through a similar deep looking into the work of the early 20th century - Boccioni, Moore, and Noguchi all come to mind.

In the smaller gallery, Yang expands from the idea of pairs and siblings into an entire family in a series of smaller paintings inspired by Bellini’s many versions of the Madonna and Child, on view at the Gallerie Academia, Venezia. Struck by the artist’s dedication to revisiting a single subject so many times over the course of his life, while also making each painting feel singular, Yang decided to make a group of paintings all the same scale, with the same motifs, expressed uniquely. Mimicking the rectangular frame, which often delineates the bottom register of Bellini’s paintings, setting the perspective and depth of the image, each of the seven paintings from this series is diverse in color and composition, but this framing device is constant.

Finally, the titular painting Cryptic Aperture emerged from a desire to break the perception that the groups of figures in Yang’s paintings are single forms. In this painting, two distinct clusters of forms engage each other in a similarly framed space - this box-like composition that unites Bellini to Picasso to Yang - only here, there is a partially open door leading to a black void, an unknown space.

Mark Yang (b. 1994, Seoul, South Korea, lives and works in Tivoli, New York) received a B.F.A from Art Center College of Design and an M.F.A. from Columbia University, New York. Yang has held solo exhibitions at Massimo De Carlo Pièce Unique, Paris; Various Small Fires, Los Angeles and Seoul; Half Gallery, New York; and Steve Turner, Los Angeles. The artist has been in group exhibitions at Kasmin, New York; Perrotin, Paris; Spurs Gallery, Beijing and Saga, Seoul, among others. His work is included in the public collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; the Mint Museum, Charlotte; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and the Rubell Museum, Miami. In 2024, Yang will present solo exhibitions at Massimo De Carlo in Beijing, and at Kasmin in New York.