Mark Messersmith

Mark Messersmith’s work appropriates two radically different traditions, creating an idiosyncratic and imaginative visual lexicon uniquely its own. In his inventive symbolist paintings, Messersmith calls to mind illuminated medieval manuscripts and the compartmental assemblages of modernists such as Jasper Johns and Joseph Cornell. In works such as Those Left Behind (2013), the artist extends beyond the frame his central image of birds surveying man’s ruin. He also includes a small frieze of vignettes at the bottom and sculptural adornments at the frame’s edge. The works’ electric colors and complex graphic images are narrative and emotionally propulsive.