Mark Van Wagner

In combining movement with stillness, Mark Van Wagner’s artworks reference and combine various archeological, architectural, anthropomorphic characteristics, and various investigations of the inner and outer landscape. His sculptures and paintings often depict moments of impact and reverberations of force. The implications of conflict and destruction are present but so are humor and restoration, providing a sense of intimacy and introspection for the embodied subject.

Over the years, Van Wagner has collected natural sand from around the world and combines this substance along with flotsam and pigmented sand onto his layered-relief paintings and sculptures. In the exploration of applying mixed-media/assemblage into his artwork, he has recognized sand to be the most literal medium to capture material decomposition - its essence defining impermanence related to time, place and gross matter. Thick and thin spontaneous-gestural applications of glue adhesives and primers are sprinkled with innumerable sand particles and flotsam that simultaneously mimic a pointilist-pixelationist approach. By mending and reassembling the sand back into a concrete substance onto his canvases and repurposed cardboard boxes his work playfully reminds us of life’s cycles.


Pictured above is the artist's studio - Bellport, Long Island