The Human Condition

These are profoundly confusing and chaotic times. All bets are off. The center does not hold. Civilization is dying and I find myself (much to my astonishment) an old man.

So what is my new work about? Love, empathy, relationships, conflict and the tragedy and joys of Middle-class life…. These were my obsessions for almost sixty years of painting. But alas, I found in the last five years or so a strong desire to move away from these largely autobiographical concerns, to seek something broader than my personal travails of Job-like suffering.

I thought, what would it be like if I imagined some Diego Rivera-like muralistic energy, shrunk to my preferred scale? A giant, wall sized mural, but made ridiculously small, including all that Rivera ambition and complexity. I fantasized little children walking by it at some regional library somewhere in the Midwest. Philip Guston channeled some of this authentic Mexican energy in his own, very early work, and it came back to pay off in spades for him later on.

But unlike Rivera, my “political” art would have no clear agenda. It would indeed confound the logic of propaganda; mocking meaning, (not cynically, and hopefully, not stupidly) but, like Kafka, piercing that frozen lake—with absurdity, as well as genuine feeling.

This is what I’ve been trying to do, anyway, with my recent paintings about war and suffering and killing and unspeakable horror. I realized that in painting these images, it’s not that I feel less immersed or implicated in the pain-of-others, but paradoxically more.

I’ve always subscribed to the idea of making every painting like my life depended on it. I feel this urgency now, more so than ever.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce Mark Greenwold: The Human Condition, an exhibition of six paintings by Mark Greenwold, all made between 2023 and 2024. Opening Thursday, January 9, 2025, the exhibition marks a significant shift from the artist’s depictions of Freudian psychodramas to the spectacular dysfunction of the wider world.

American Dream (2023) is a phantasmagoria of Americana: plucky construction workers carry lumber, children play, and silos stand flush with grain. A building-mounted American flag is blown backward by the wind. In the foreground, a Chinese worker submits to the familiar indignity of a COVID swab, collected by an impersonal, hazmat-suited arm. A Black man peers out from iron bars, hinting at the many crosscurrents and parallel realities in the frenetic country.

Greenwold’s famously—almost pathologically—laborious process mirrors the psychological intensity of his paintings. In each, the artist works under magnification, like a jeweler, with correspondingly minuscule brushes. He builds up the surfaces stroke by stroke, all the while flipping between various preparatory photographs and drawings. The result is a kind of delirious realism in which precise, minute details are formed out of a substrate of thousands upon thousands of beautiful abstractions.

For decades, Greenwold has depicted friends and family. The familiar cast enact domestic psychodramas, entangling sex, violence, intimacy, and vulnerability. In the new works, Greenwold’s intense gaze turns outwards. The roiling currents of violence are no longer subtextual. In War and Industry (2024), bloodied children and bombed out structures share space with blowjobs and Jesus. Chaos and destruction form a nearly cubist lattice for Greenwold’s cast of tearful women, rats, soldiers, and casualties; exigent contemporary events command the scope of attention.

Born in Cleveland in 1942, Mark Greenwold studied painting at Carnegie Mellon University, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and Indiana University. Since 1979, he has had fewer than a dozen solo exhibitions, two of which contained only one painting. His 1995 mid-career retrospective, Mark Greenwold: The Odious Facts, 1975–1995, contained a scant 27 works—virtually his entire mature oeuvre at the time—and took place at the Colby College Museum of Art. His paintings have appeared in numerous recent group exhibitions, including Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque (2005, SITE Santa Fe), Embracing Modernism (2015, Morgan Library and Museum), Intimacy in Discourse (2015, Mana Contemporary), and Retinal Hysteria (2023, Venus Over Manhattan).

Greenwold’s work is in the permanent collections of major museums across the United States, including: the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; the Hirshhorn Museum of Art and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Morgan Library and Museum, New York; the National Academy Museum, New York; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Mark Greenwold.