About
Pictures should be able to function across the fullest range of content. The conceptual should be able to mingle with the formal and subject matter should enjoy intimate relations with both.
—Mark Tansey
Each of Mark Tansey’s paintings is a visual adventure that explores the nature of perception, meaning, and subjectivity. Working with the traditions of figurative and landscape painting, Tansey incorporates his expansive knowledge of history in layers of literary, philosophical, and mathematical references. Distortions of perspective and scale combine with his technical proficiency to complicate what it means to view and understand an image.
Growing up in San Jose, California, with an art historian for a father, Tansey became familiar with art at a young age. This experience kick-started the mental and physical database of visual references that he continues to draw on for his meticulously detailed paintings today. In 1969 Tansey enrolled at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, where he began to explore the appropriation of mass media, prefiguring the work of the Pictures Generation, who would investigate similar questions in the 1980s. In 1974 Tansey moved to New York and enrolled in the graduate program at Hunter College, where he further explored the ways in which historical arcs could be reimagined and presented in surreal tableaux.
Tansey’s paintings are monochromatic and possess a near-photographic precision, accomplished through a subtractive painting process: Tansey first primes his canvas with white gesso, then blocks out the general forms of the composition by covering sections with color, and finally carefully removes layers of paint to reveal varying degrees of the canvas beneath. He works between New York and Portsmouth, Rhode Island, producing about one painting every two years, each composed from arrangements of sketches, collages, and collected ephemera.
In 2004 an exhibition of Tansey’s recent paintings at Gagosian’s West 24th Street gallery in New York marked the first time that he used ultramarine blue, a hue that is now characteristic of his oeuvre. Praised for their sense of urgency, the ultramarine paintings depict sublime natural landscapes punctuated with small figures, ships navigating through towering waves, and vertigo-inducing reflections, cleverly conflating up and down, then and now. Though the complex scenes are rendered with schematic exactitude, as the viewer peers in to examine the many details, intimate expressive moments are revealed, where the fluidity of paint asserts itself without distracting from the overall hyperreal effect.
Photo: DPA Picture Alliance Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
#MarkTansey
Exhibitions
Back to the Cave
Dorothy Spears writes on mountains and caves in the work of Mark Tansey, exploring themes of perception and process.
Transformations
A 1994 exhibition hosted by Mark Tansey in his New York apartment foregrounded a dynamic approach to realism taking shape on the margins of an art world preoccupied with conceptualism. On display were works by four Chinese artists—Chen Danqing, Ni Jun, Yu Hong, and Liu Xiaodong.
Painters without Borders
The exhibition Figurative Diaspora, cocurated by Mark Tansey and Peter Drake, presented paintings by five Chinese artists alongside work by six Russian artists, all of whom create “unofficial,” subversive, non-state-sanctioned art, thus tracing the influences of art across borders.
Figurative Diaspora
Curated by Mark Tansey and Peter Drake of the New York Academy of Art, Figurative Diaspora presents works of “unofficial art”—subversive, non-state sanctioned art—created by five Soviet artists and five contemporary Chinese artists.
Spotlight
Mark Tansey
Alexander Wolf guides us through a multilayered new painting by the celebrated artist.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Online Reading
Mark Tansey
Mark Tansey is available for online reading from April 19 to May 18 as part of Artist Spotlight: Mark Tansey. The publication documents nine paintings made by the artist between 2006 and 2012. The works are painted in ultramarine, a color that combines the depth and complexities of black with the lightness and transparency of blue and that imparts the historicizing feel of the now-obsolescent blueprint. Each work is shown with numerous details, allowing the viewer to discover Tansey’s visual allegories and philosophical references within each composition.
Mark Tansey (New York: Gagosian, 2013)
Artist Spotlight
Mark Tansey
April 19–25, 2023
Each of Mark Tansey’s paintings and drawings is a visual adventure that explores the nature of perception, meaning, and subjectivity. Working with the traditions of figurative and landscape painting, Tansey incorporates his expansive knowledge of history in layers of literary, philosophical, and mathematical references. Distortions of perspective and scale combine with his technical proficiency to complicate what it means to view and understand an image.
Photo: DPA Picture Alliance Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
Art Fair
Basel Online 2020
In our most significant online sales presentation to date, Gagosian unveils important works by modern and contemporary masters through two separate online platforms—Gagosian Online and Art Basel Online. These individually curated selections offer collectors direct access to artworks of the highest caliber. To experience the presentation in its entirety, viewers will need to visit both gagosian.com and artbasel.com. The works on gagosian.com will rotate every forty-eight hours, for a total of five cycles.
Helen Frankenthaler, Orange Underline, 1963 © 2020 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Museum Exhibitions
Closed
Figurative Diaspora
January 16–March 4, 2018
New York Academy of Art
nyaa.edu
Curated by Mark Tansey and Peter Drake, dean of the New York Academy of Art, Figurative Diaspora presents works of “unofficial art”—subversive, non-state-sanctioned art—created by six Soviet artists and five contemporary Chinese artists. It is the first exhibition to trace the direct influences of the USSR on the artists of the People’s Republic of China.
Installation view, Figurative Diaspora, New York Academy of Art, January 16–March 4, 2018. Artwork, left to right: © Vitaly Komar, © Xie Dongming, © Liu Xiadong, © Komar and Melamid, © Oleg Vassiliev, © Yu Hong. Photo: courtesy New York Academy of Art
Closed
Literary Devices
October 11, 2014–March 15, 2015
Fisher Landau Center for Art, New York
flcart.org
Literary Devices, which comprises works representing text, literary themes, and books themselves, explores the tension between language and image. The exhibition features works by over forty artists, including Richard Artschwager, Gregory Crewdson, Neil Jenney, Donald Judd, Mike Kelley, Anselm Kiefer, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Mark Tansey, and Cy Twombly.
Richard Artschwager, Cerise, 2002 © 2015 Richard Artschwager/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Closed
Legacy
The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
June 5–September 14, 2014
San José Museum of Art, California
sjmusart.org
Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection presents a selection of works from the historic gift of art pledged to the Whitney in May 2010 by longtime museum trustee Emily Fisher Landau. The exhibition, which includes more than seventy works by thirty-eight artists, traces many of the ideas that have preoccupied artists in the United States, particularly since the 1960s. Questions about the relevance of painting in the aftermath of Minimalism, debates about representation, “culture wars,” and a revived interest in personal narratives are explored. This exhibition has traveled from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Work by Richard Artschwager, Gregory Crewdson, Willem de Kooning, Nan Goldin, Neil Jenney, Vera Lutter, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Mark Tansey, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol is included.
Mark Tansey, Valley of Doubt, 1990 © Mark Tansey. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art
Closed
The Big Picture
Desiderio, Fischl, Rauch, Saville, Tansey
January 28–March 9, 2014
New York Academy of Art
nyaa.edu
The Big Picture presents monumental canvases by five figurative artists—Vincent Desiderio, Eric Fischl, Neo Rauch, Jenny Saville, and Mark Tansey—who share a connection to the New York Academy of Art. The works included demand the viewer’s attention, making a statement that is at once grand in scale, conceptually ambitious, and specific to their moment.
Mark Tansey, Duet, 2004 © Mark Tansey