Mark Tansey

Mark Tansey was born in 1949 in San José (California) and now lives in New York. Like certain other artists of his generation – Eric Fischl, Julian Schnabel and David Salle – he is regarded as one of the most influential protagonists of a new figurative painting that materialised at the beginning of the 1980s; a response to the purism of Conceptual Art and Minimal Art. His paintings are always of a single hue, and appear at first glace to be reproductions of photographs. They are, in fact, complex pictorial and sensual constructions that ask fundamental questions about our relationship to reality and about the specific role of art in our understanding of this reality. In this volume, a new group of paintings that Mark Tansey has been working on since 2000 are published for the first time. These paintings continue the process of questioning from earlier periods of his work, and, at the same time, commence a completely new chapter in his creative work.