Press & Media

“The Hateful Years: Mark Flood Takes On Luxembourg & Dayan,” Huffington Post

Mark Flood is often referred to as a punk artist, partially because he played in a band named ‘Culturcide’ in his youth, and also because he makes some very angry paintings. At 54, the Houston-based artist is looking back on his oeuvre in a new solo show. Though we’re not often fans of ’80s nostalgia, we are happy to report that the first survey of Flood’s work during this period is now on view at Luxembourg & Dayan in New York, and it’s worth checking out.

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“Art: Francis X. Pavy – At last, a tribute to the statehood bicentennial,” Louisiana Life Magazine

Francis Xavier Pavy, long known for his vibrant and whimsical paintings of Louisiana’s Cajun and zydeco music, is telling the story of the state’s history the best way he knows how – through his art. In his new work, 200: Art Inspired by 200 Years of Louisiana Statehood, he has created an ambitious series of paintings that explores the history of Louisiana from colonial times to the present. This tribute to Louisiana, however, is not a chronological narrative of the state’s 200-year history but paintings filled with symbols representing events, people and aspects of Louisiana’s past and present.

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“Just (a few more) Kids: George Dureau, Robert Mapplethorpe and Company,” Jeu de Paume

Dureau, on the other hand, was a people person, not an aesthete like either Mapplethorpe or Weston. His pictures breathe, they pulse, they are hot with the blood and sweat of the sitters who joined him in his apartment on Esplanade Street in the city where he was born, and sometimes posed with props that were part of his personal effects. Edward Lucie-Smith, who wrote a fine introduction to a book of Dureau’s photographs published in the 1980s, compared the artist’s ability to transform these autobiographical encounters into photographically classical pictures with the writing strategies of Baudelaire, most notably in the Tableaux Parisiens of Les Fleurs du Mal.

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“Artist Mark Flood makes a rare appearance at…his own exhibition,” CAPITAL NY

Flood’s most recent works are his “lace paintings,” which he’s been at for more than a decade now. Originally conceived as backdrops for his text incitements, the lace paintings took on their own life. Painted in acrylic on canvas, the images are created by using tattered lace pieces—sourced from thrift and fabric shops—as stencils. They are dipped in paint, then spread on the canvas, then painted over, then removed (the timing for removal is evidently key). They are intricate, delicate, technically innovative, and abuzz with color: wholly unlike anything else he’s done. They have certainly become highly sought-after and are largely responsible for the invigoration of his career.

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“There’s Something About Mark Flood: Cameron Diaz Turns Up for ‘Hateful Years’,” GalleristNY

Barry Manilow and David Lee Roth—present in the form of grotesquely distorted photo collages—weren’t the only celebrities at the opening of artist Mark Flood’s career survey, “The Hateful Years,” at Upper East Side gallery Luxembourg & Dayan the other night. Cameron Diaz was on hand, and paused to pose for photographer Mary Barone (remember her people pics from the sadly now-defunct Artnet magazine?) along with Mr. Flood and the artist Dan Colen.

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“No ‘Sacred Monster,’ Just a His-Way Artist,” New York Times

To call someone an artists’ artist is often just a craven way of saying, “Sorry about your career.” But over the past two decades the Houston painter and punk propagandist Mark Flood, 54, has fit the bill, beating a fevered pulse beneath the work of many younger artists, who have been inspired by his anarchic humor and disturbing vision of contemporary culture.

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Review of “George Dureau, Black: 1973-1986,” photograph

George Dureau’s Black, at Higher Pictures through July 13 is a jewel of an exhibition comprised of only 15 black-and-white prints. Though the artist is in his eighties, and though the photos on view are from the ’70s and ’80s, for many of us, this small show serves as an introduction to Dureau’s work.

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“George Dureau: ‘Black 1973-1986’,” New York Times

The first New York exhibition of George Dureau’s black-and-white photographs, mostly of bare-chested or nude young men, is long overdue. Mr. Dureau, who was born in New Orleans in 1930 and has lived most of his life there, began taking them in the early 1970s. The photographs were partly intended as studies for his figurative paintings, which they tend to overshadow.

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“Beautiful, flow-triumphant Pour Paintings by Holton Rower on show in New York,” It’s Nice That

What is more impressive than one psychedelic spectral pour painting by Holton Rower? 19 of them. New York’s The Hole gallery presents the latest in the artist’s beautifully vivid, process-driven works that reveal the time that made them like the rings of a tree while simultaneously appearing as if a particularly chromatic work of art had melted on its plinth.

“Paint here is truly on parade,” says the gallery of the collected works. Individually they are the product of a high experimentation and pre-meditation; the properties of each cascading colour creating a singular, accumulative path that blends, moves about and pushes, vacillating form and direction and finally settling into autonomous and unexpected beauty.

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“What art does a rich 18-year-old popstar buy?,” Phaidon.com

Rower’s method is structured and demanding – paint must be poured at a specific rate lest colours merge too quickly and drying time be compromised – but the results are unexpected and often dramatic. Colour combinations are premeditated, mostly, but inevitable experimentation reveals myriad new colourways, played out in fractious zig zags and waterfalls reminiscent of any number of different things – Rorschach tests, for example, or mitochondria or the colourful surfaces of faraway planets.

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