Mark Flood: Decorations on her body
“When I look at lace, I don't think of grandma. (…) Lace is an organized landscape, historically related to French formal gardening. I drag that into contemporary times: There is no wilderness, and people have to manage everything that was wild and natural. It's weird and has unsavory implications“
- MARK FLOOD
In his first exhibition at the Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery, the American painter Mark Flood will be showing works from his series of “Lace Paintings”. While the lace motif used to be no more than a background motif in his work, it now dominates all of Flood’s paintings. In much the same way as the English pioneer of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot, captured the folds and frayed edges of lace doilies and tablecloths on light-sensitive paper during the 1840s, Mark Flood has for some years been experimenting with lace imprints in oil on canvas. These fragmentary motifs awaken associations with coastlines and rivers or with billowing clouds of mist or steam. For Mark Flood, lace does not just evoke nostalgic memories of grandmother’s time.
