Mark Brogan’s paintings are informed by his experiences and recollections of life in the UK and in Germany and Serbia where he has also lived. He retells these impressions as visual stories influenced by the work of other artists who speak of issues which mirror his own experiences; belonging, marginality, inequality, religion and trauma. His paintings resemble maps or sets of coordinates as much as images.
Since graduating from the Fine Art department at Goldsmiths College in the late 1990s, Mark Brogan has been an active participant in many different art scenes, from the East London art scene of the 1990s and later in Germany and Serbia where he lived for the past twenty years, pursuing his career as a painter and also working as a translator of cultural, socio-historical and psychoanalytical publications.
The exhibition title, The hills are flat in the dark is taken from a work he was commissioned to make whilst living in Belgrade, and is based on the wars in Bosnia in the 1990s. This painting sets the course for the next chapter of his work as an artist – echoing the way the unconscious manifests our past and buried experience in dreams.
The coordinates of these recent works are marked out by references to his own earlier paintings and to influential artworks by other artists. The dispersion of colours, and the array of varyingly abstract and descriptive brush strokes lead the viewer’s eyes around the paintings, which coalesce into single images when viewed from a distance.
He paints with brushes, with his fingers and with melting pigmented ice blocks which he scrapes and dabs over the painting surface. He also balances the ice blocks on small ledges in the midst of the paintings where they melt and deposit their pigment directly. The paintings embody both static and dynamic movement, active and passive processes.
The melting blocks reference Surrealism and action painting in which the artist smears, splashes and dribbles paint onto the canvas or paper, allowing it to melt onto the surface. Pleasure and enjoyment are manifested in the way the paintings are realised, and they demonstrate how experience can be visualised and shared with the viewer.