Last Saturday, July 5th, was the opening reception for Mark Horst’s Figures & More exhibition at Sumner & Dene Creations in Art. Positive energy filled the gallery as many friends and locals came by to see the latest series in Horst’s signature artwork.
Horst is a figurative expressionist painter with a large following; Many who have become as enamored with his art work as I have. Author, teacher and painter Martin Shaw says, “Mark Horst carries a quiver full of painterly gifts. His startling work reveals wild pinpricks of the eternal, often in the subtlest of images. Make no mistake, the paintings sometimes hold our feet to the flame-a door between a collectively understood image and some new paint-spirit that comes hurtling through. Not always a comfortable experience. Horst is one of the few new painters to hold the paradox of tradition and innovation within him- there is brilliance here.”
After hiring and working with professional models, Horst finds the best subjects for his paintings tend to be his own son or granddaughter. His paintings usually begin with a series of rapid-fire photographs, timed seconds apart. Horst then draws his figures with charcoal. After working to render an image accurately, he might brush it into a blurred mess. Or he might use a scrapper to distort and blend all the parts and pieces that seem to be isolated and distinct. Horst says, “Nothing is more tedious to me than a painting that has resolved every ambiguity.” This process is exactly what distinguishes Horst’s paintings from all others.
Horst grew up in small town Minnesota. He studied pottery and printmaking in high school and college, but eventually earned a Ph.D. in theology from Yale University. After twenty years as a pastor, teaching and working toward neighborhood renewal in south Minneapolis, Horst pursued the craft of painting and drawing at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the New York Studio School. He has publicly exhibited his artwork since 2007. Most notably at Canyon Road Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Philip Morton Gallery in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and Fine Art Associates in Boulder, Colorado. He now lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Mark Horst’s exhibition, Figures & More, will hang through July 26th at Sumner & Dene Creations in Art, 517 Central Avenue, NW, Albuquerque, NM 87102, (505) 842-1400, www.sumnerdene.com
