Mark Tansey

Art Brokerage: Mark Tansey American Artist: b. 1949. He is a contemporary of Neo-Expressionist and neo-geo artists, but Tansey practices what could be termed neohistoricism. By overlaying formulaic landscape paintings with seemingly divergent narratives, Tansey foregrounds the ambiguity of even well-established histories. Tansey's monochromatic palette recalls the cyanotypes of early scientific illustration and the days of black and white. Yet through the metaphoric license inherent in illustrative painting, the artist presents a contradictory postmodern jumble of meaning. Tansey's latest works implicate themselves in the relationship of economics and art. For all their irony, they cannot avoid recalling what for painting was both crisis and boon: the Reagan/Thatcher era, when even for those defending the relevance of their medium, down was down, up was up.