Mark Flood

Art Brokerage: Mark Flood American Artist: Mark Flood, is a painter and musician known for his fierce intelligence, wry wit, and undeniable talent. Beginning with his paintings and collages from the 1980s - while he was in the punk rock band Culturcide - Flood has been a raucous cultural critic, attacking one and all: low-brow and high culture. Flood, seems to have a split personality: one half punk-propaganda master and one half elegant lace painter. Using toxic colors and combinations, Flood started making paintings from paint soaked lace pressed against a canvas, showing the age and wear endured by the battered lace before its last incarnation in printmaking. Devoid of irony, the lace paintings have a formal beauty that transcends Flood’s earlier oeuvre, while still delivering a punch in the gut to traditional heroic notions of painting. Flood attributes this shift in style in part to critic Dave Hickey’s 1993 book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. “Hickey made me realize that I made ugly art,” says Flood. “But that’s what I thought art was about—if you made something beautiful, you were suspect. … When I discovered how to make something beautiful, I no longer needed any art bureaucracy.” Mark Flood got his BA from Rice University in Houston. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and internationally in Spain, Greece and Germany. Flood’s work can be found in the collections of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Menil Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Birmingham Art Museum. Listings wanted by Art Brokerage.