Bienvenue
Overview
For Bienvenue Art Fair Andrea Festa presents a duo-show " Hidden melancholy" by Dylan Hurwitz and Jade van der Mark. The artists rework the melancholy hidden in our contemporary times, restoring it in a disenchanted and free way. Jade van der Mark and Dylan Hurwitz, two styles between dream and reality, passing through personal imaginary. The room, based on a strong aesthetic experiential component, is characterized by a broad stylistic register and by an eclectic mix of unique artworks that coexists freely.
Dylan Hurwitz
“My hope is to raise visibility and create a sense of community by bringing people together,” says Hurwitz, artist, activist, and director of the Boston LGBTQIA Artists Alliance (BLAA), an organization 70 members strong. He elaborates that the wide range of backgrounds of BLAA’s artists is exactly what makes the collective so exciting. While the Alliance recently lost permanent exhibition space, they continue to organize shows by holding “pop up” events in galleries throughout Boston.
Hurwitz’s portrayals of queer embodiment combine luminous color and crackling impasto in their slow-burning narrative intimacy; the viewer, whether cast as voyeur or the subject himself, activates molten tenderness in each composition through artistically engineered proximity, whether scanning a glowy bathhouse pastoral or glancing down at a lover’s large, square hand. Hurwitz’s soft stylizations treat paint as a sculptural highlight, employing texture as a way to pull focus or create hierarchical depth in pictorial space.
The removal of shame, and a certain joyousness in the space created by the body, is essential to this vision of queer community. A kind of dialogue emerges where the bodies that inhabit this littoral climate take on a responsive shape in relation to their environment. As the viewer gazes through the legs of a stranger, these legs-become-monoliths are not less supple for becoming so perspectivally mountainous.
“In my work, genderless hands reach, hold, contain, rub, stroke, massage, chop, disrobe, wash, type, calculate, and more in attempted fulfillment of various bodily desires. The subjects in these paintings seek pleasure and prioritize self care over productivity. Disembodied hands and their contact with various structures and surfaces are the subject- be it with other bodies, consumer products, food, and more. Seeing the world through these hands implies a bodily dissociation while creating a point-of-view perspective that invites the viewer’s projections of themselves into the work. The radicality of queer desire and sexuality underlines my work.”
Dylan Hurwitz (1989, Brooklyn, NY) is based out of Brooklyn, NY. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Freight+Volume (New York), and two-person shows with Baby Blue Gallery (Chicago), and Auxier Kline (New York). He’s also been in group shows in New York at Monya Rowe Gallery, Zürcher Gallery, Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, National Arts Club, and Danese Corey. Residencies include Takt Residency (Berlin) and DNA Residency (Provincetown, MA). Hurwitz received his MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University.
Jade van de Mark
“I am painting all the dark subjects of society in color, for every human being there is a role on my canvas.” – Jade van der Mark
Jade van der Mark (Bergen, the Netherlands, 1990) is a Dutch Contemporary figurative painter. Based between Amsterdam and London, she is a self- taught female painter that explores contemporary and examines the dichotomy of crowds and human intimacy. Her large-scale group portraits of cities’ inhabitants highlight issues of overpopulation, greed, burnouts and oppression. The colorful and lively figures remind us of a shared humanity. Thereby, the works are a colorful reflection on the fast-paced city lives of the city’s people. Each work is telling the story of strangers, who don’t know they’re being painted, but are brought together to create a unified story of our world.
In her works, van der Mark uses cities and crowds as a source of inspiration, sketching in the heart of the capital and documenting the vibrancy of urban life. Her large-scale portraits of cities’ inhabitants highlight issues of overpopulation, isolation, greed and oppression, while through colorful and lively figures her works remind us of our shared humanity. Playful but profound, her paintings make the mundane vibrant and beautiful, with an edge of melancholia. With the use of thick coats of oil paint, the Dutch painter gives life to monumental textured canvases, rich in detail and complexity and majestic in size. The use of bold and abstracted color palettes conveys a sense of sculptural depth, amplifying their gravitas. As each layer may take up to a week to dry, van der Mark’s paintings are the result of a labored process lasting up to eight months. Containing multiple stories, which over the course of completion have been altered or painted over, her works unveil hidden narratives that encourage deeper reflection.
Diving into diverse identities, van der Mark reveals a vast network of personal stories that share the same spaces but lack connection. Colorful figures are representative of the artist’s belief in a shared humanity. Set in decontextualized city spaces, van der Mark’s paintings speak to an overwhelming sense of disconnect that resonates globally. Her works depict crowded scenes, where figures are frozen in the chaos of rush hour, their stress and exhaustion evident in their expressions. The attention to texture is crucial to van der Mark’s practice as a whole, which combines a passion of painting with an education in Fashion, obtained at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. A self-taught weaver, she weaves her paintings into elaborate and distinctive items of clothing, works of art in and of themselves. During Milan Fashion Week 2016 she was awarded the Dutch Fashion Award for her exceptional designs.Since 2017, van der Mark has been completely focused on painting.
Van der Mark has showcased and sold her works widely in the Netherlands and internationally, exhibiting in Amsterdam, Brussels, London and Milan. This includes a solo show at ING Headquarters in Amsterdam and participation in Salone Mobile Design Week in Milan and a solo exhibition at Pi artworks gallery in London.
Works
Installation Views
