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Mark Beard
Young Swimmer (Modern, Academic Style Portrait Painting in Antique Gold Frame)

unknown

About the Item

Figurative oil on canvas painting of a young athletic male 24 x 20 inches, 29.5 x 23.5 inches vintage gold painted wood frame signed B. Sargeant in red in upper right hand corner This academic style portrait of a single male athlete, presumably a swimmer, was painted by Mark Beard under his fictitious persona, Bruce Sargeant. He is poised shirtless with atheletic abdominal muscles and his hands on his hips. The figure's flesh has a grey coloration, typical of Mark Beard's painting. Spots around the elbows, chest, nose and knees are slightly rouged. Painted in a traditional style, calling to mind a contemporary John Singer Sargent. About the artist: Mark Beard is perhaps the most literal example of an artist pulled in so many different directions that he chose to “invent” six different personae in which to channel his overflowing energy and need for expression. Each painting style is radically different from the next, so it remains entirely believable that the work could stem from six completely different people of different time periods and different schools of thought. With a background in set design, Beard has always been one who could conjure total magic with anything available. For this exhibit, he returns as the beloved 20th century painter from England, Bruce Sargeant, featuring a parade of Arcadian scenes suggesting afternoons of young men sporting in the countryside, rowing, bicycling, hunting or wrestling. Clean shaven, well manicured youths pose casually, indulging every opportunity to display a titillating flex of stone-like musculature. Like modern Greek statues, Beard paints these prestigious figures oftentimes in pairs of twos and threes in a lazy state of beautiful passivity. Mark Beard keeps himself fresh with challenge, undertaking ambitious commissions and committing to weekly sketch sessions with live models in his Manhattan studio. The result of this dedicated practice is a stunning array of graphite and conte crayon drawings on Arches paper. Mark Beard has exhibited with our gallery for nearly twenty years and there has never been a dull moment. Mark Beard, born in 1956 in Salt Lake city, now lives in New York City. His works are in museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; and the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton University Art Museums; among many others. We would not be the least bit surprised to see new ‘personas’ emerge in the coming years.
  • Creator:
    Mark Beard (1956, American)
  • Creation Year:
    unknown
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 29.5 in (74.93 cm)Width: 23.5 in (59.69 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Hudson, NY
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU2271358933

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Portrait of Dave Winfield Edward Avedisian 20 x 14 inches, acrylic on stretched canvas Armenian-American artist, Avedisian was best known for his work made in New York City during the 1960s: brilliantly colored, boldly composed canvases that combined Minimalism’s rigor, Pop’s exuberance and the saturated tones of Color Field painting. He was largely recognized for a series of Beach Ball paintings that emerged in the early 1960's and into the later 1960's the artist began painting larger horizontal paintings, featuring vertically intersecting beacon-like stripes that highlighted characteristics from both the Post-Painterly and Color Field movements. In this portrait, Avedisian using his signature use of color, combining bright rusty reds and oranges against a metallic green gold backdrop. A major work from Avedesian's color-stripe series was featured on the cover of Artforum's January 1969 issue (pictured here). 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About the Artist: In the 1960’s, Edward Avedisian was one of the youngest of those luminaries producing a grand new abstract painting. Shown first at Ivan Karp and Dick Bellamy’s Hansa Gallery and then at Robert Elkon, Avedisian’s insouciant mix of pop playfulness, color field cool and high formalist style put his art in a unique, and at the time generously rewarded, position. Paintings made it onto the cover of Artforum, were purchased by all the major museums, were among the few abstract works shown as representative of America’s post-war achievement at Expo 67 in Montreal and comprised a cornerstone in histories of the period written by Barbara Rose, among others. The artist was largely influenced by his Color-Field predecessors, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Throughout the 1960's and into the mid 1970's the artist was celebrated in the Manhattan art scene, contributing to the Post-Painterly Abstraction movements with contemporaries Helen Frankenthaler, Andy Warhol, Jules Olitski, and Larry Poons. Museum Collections: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York Brooklyn Museum, New York Chrysler Art Museum, Norfolk, Virginia Denver Art Museum, Colorado Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas The Larry Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Minneapolis Institute of Arts Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York, Purchase Los Angeles County Museum, California Neuberger Museum, SUNY, Purchase, New York Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum *above description text is supported by Alexandra C. Anderson's article on Edward Avedesian in Artforum's January 1969 issue. NY Times Obituary, published Aug 23, 2007 by Roberta Smith: Mr. Avedisian was best known for his work in the 1960s: brilliantly colored, boldly composed canvases that combined Minimalism’s rigor, Pop’s exuberance and the saturated tones of Color Field painting. A frequent motif was a cluster of bright seedlike orbs corralled at the center of a vibrant monochrome field by larger rings of color, creating an image that could resemble a buoyant cross-section of some unknown fruit. Mr. Avedisian was born in Lowell, Mass., in 1936 and studied art at the Boston Museum School. By the late 1950s he was living in New York, part of a generation of promising young painters that included Frank Stella, Larry Poons and Darby Bannard. From 1958 to 1963 Mr. Avedisian had six solo shows in New York galleries, including two at the Robert Elkon Gallery, where he continued to show almost every year until 1975. By the early 1960s Mr. Avedisian was a rising star. 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