Mark Dean Veca

Mark Dean Veca is an American artist (born 1963) based in Altadena, California. He creates paintings, drawings and large-scale installations.

Biography

Mark Dean Veca was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in 1985.

Veca has exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan at institutions such as the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. His work has been reviewed in numerous publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art Review, Juxtapoz, and Flash Art.

Veca conducted one-on-one master critiques with undergraduate and graduate Fine Arts students at Otis College of Art and Design in the fall of 2008 as part of the Jennifer Howard Coleman Distinguished Lectureship and Residency.

He currently lives in Los Angeles and his next solo exhibition is scheduled to open Sept. 18 at Western Project.

Veca’s work

Veca is known for creating paintings, drawings and installations that portray surreal cartoons, psychedelic landscapes, and pop culture iconography while also being inspired by long-established decorative motifs.[1]

He is widely recognized for his all-encompassing installations that surround the viewer and incite a sense of awe. Revealing fantastical, humorous, aggressive, or sexual imagery with both frenzy and pattern-like precision, his works often recall a modernized type of toile painting.[2]

In the 1998 catalogue for Veca’s El Gloominator exhibition, Steve Mitchell asserts, “Veca works in the meticulous tradition of the fresco painter to produce an image that paradoxically evokes the immediacy of the graffiti artist.” [3]

Carlo McCormick states in a Juxtapoz magazine article that within the artist’s installation work, “confines create ideas, obstacles dictate illusions, and the proliferation of optic information ignites a kind of brain-searing explosion.” [4]

In 2004, Veca was commissioned by Nike to design an installation as well as a limited edition product series. Entitled Pulsation, the work was exhibited at 255 in New York.[5]

Veca’s most recent solo exhibition, Imbroglio (October 20 – November 17, 2007), was held at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery and was his most ambitious New York exhibition thus far. Veca presented 17 new paintings on panel, which were incorporated into an installation.[6]

Awards

Most recently, Veca was named Honoree of the fall 2008 Jennifer Howard Coleman Distinguished Lectureship and Residency at Otis College of Art and Design. In 2006, he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Amongst his many honors, Veca has thrice received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in painting and has carried out artist residencies for institutions such as the Bronx Museum, the MacDowell Colony, and Villa Montalvo.

Solo exhibitions

2009

  • Revenge of Phantasmagoria, Instituto Cultural de Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico,(Organized by the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design), November 28, 2009 - January 10, 2010.
  • University Art Gallery, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA, January 30–15 March 2009.

2008

  • Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, October 11 – December 6, 2008.

2007

  • Imbroglio, Jonathan LeVine Gallery, New York, NY

2006

  • Picturing Florida, Schmidt Center Gallery, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL (with Ellen Harvey)

2004

  • Pulsation, 255 Elizabeth Street, New York, NY, Commissioned by Nike

2003

  • Pleasure Machine, Mars Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
  • Royale, Jessica Murray Projects, Brooklyn, NY

2002

  • Daniel Silverstein Gallery, New York, NY (with Cotter Luppi)
  • Scope Art Fair, curated by David Hunt, New York, NY
  • Toile de Brooklyn, g-module, Paris, France

2000

  • Magnificent Compulsion, Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
  • Harum-Scarum, Gallery at Villa Montalvo, Saratoga, CA

1999

  • Funky Jungle, DiverseWorks Art Space, Houston, TX
  • Mark Dean Veca: New Paintings, Kravets/Wehby Gallery, New York, NY

1998

  • El Gloominator, State University of New York at Buffalo Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
  • Gummi Grotto, Kravets/Wehby Gallery, New York, NY

Selected group exhibitions – last 5 years

2006

  • Otis: Nine Decades of Los Angeles Art, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles
  • Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo!, Kunstverein Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany; traveled to Kunstverein Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany and Cercle Munster, Munster, Luxembourg

2005

  • Erotic Drawing, DiverseWorks, Houston, TX; traveled to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT

2004

  • Open House: Working in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY
  • NextNext Visual Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY
  • The Ludovico Treatment, Muller de Chiara Gallery, Berlin, Germany
  • Finesse, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA
  • Impact: New Mural Projects, PPOW Gallery, New York, NY
  • Grotto II, Jessica Murray Projects, Brooklyn, NY

2003

  • Pavilion, Bloomberg Space, London, England
  • Labor Day, RARE, New York, NY
  • Cartoon, Riva Gallery, New York, NY
  • Selections 2003, Muller De Chiara Gallery, Berlin, Germany
  • Metastasize, Bronx River Art Center, Bronx, NY
  • On and Off the Wall, Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg, New York, NY
  • Blue-Mars 1993-2003, Mars Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
  • Drawings and Works on Paper: SF/NY/LA, San Luis Obispo Art Center, San Luis Obispo, CA

Footnotes
  1. Stather, Martin; Heraeus, Stefanie; & Frisoni, Claude. “Mark Dean Veca” Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo! (Bielefeld, Germany: Bielefelder Kunstverein Museum Waldhof, 2006). 74.
  2. Gladman, Randy, Mark Dean Veca Archived 2008-02-25 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved on 2008-02-14.
  3. Mitchell, Steve. “That Which Illuminates Embodies the Suggestion of Darkness” Mark Dean Veca: El Gloominator (Buffalo, NY: University at Buffalo Art Gallery, 1998): 14.
  4. McCormick, Carlo (March 2006). “Mark Dean Veca; Secret Symmetries”. Juxtapoz: 56.
  5. Rubin, Josh, Mark Dean Veca. Retrieved on 2008-02-14.
  6. Seldin, Malena. Mark Dean Veca: Imbroglio Media Release (New York, NY: Jonathan LeVine Gallery, October 2007): 1.
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