Mark Flood at Peres Projects

Artist: Mark Flood

Exhibition title: Astroturf Yelp Review Says Yes

Venue: Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany

Date: May 1 – June 13, 2015

Photography: images courtesy of the artist and Peres Projects, Berlin

Peres Projects is pleased to present Astroturf Yelp Review Says Yes, the gallery’s sixth solo show with Houston-based, American artist Mark Flood for Gallery Weekend 2015. In addition to new works from the text and logo series, this exhibition is centred around a new series Aged Paintings, which will be exhibited in Berlin for the first time.

Mark Flood has been mining the cult of celebrity since the early 1980s, physically and literally distorting publicity images in every imaginable way through collage, reprinting and over-painting celebrity portraits and advertising. More recently, Flood has set his gaze on the logos of corporations, which themselves have become as identifiable as some of the people who promote their products. Again, he distorts the corporate logo as a way of giving us a new picture, undermining the great lengths corporations go to control their image. As with the Corporate Logo Paintings, which feature abstracted and blurred logos printed on canvas, the new series of Aged Paintings appropriates corporate signage in various stages of decay, clustering many together on one canvas to create new contexts and meanings. The Aged Paintings are painted with acrylic and oil on burlap with almost photorealistic precision, and then aged and patinated, appearing almost as artefacts of our times to a future civilisation.

These two bodies of work both adapt the visually coded language of logos while the Text Paintings co-opt the textual language of this same form of powerful, one way corporate communication which defines our culture. The series began as promotions for Flood’s seminal punk band Culturecide in the early 1980’s, riffing of off song lyrics and ad slogans, commanding the viewer to Fuck It, Get Laid, or to Feel It. These works exist in Astroturf Yelp Review Says Yes as stenciled text on canvas.

These self-contained yet very much linked bodies of work come together in the gallery creating a conflagration of distorted messaging. Layers of coded visual and textual signifiers are superimposed on one another and lose their individual meaning, like driving down the highway of Houston’s billboard laden freeways where logos and corporate commands are lost in a speedy blur.

Mark Flood (b. 1957 Houston, Texas, US) lives and works in Houston. Recent solo exhibitions include Mark Flood at Rubell Family Collection, Miami, US, Another Painting, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, and The Insider Art Fair, New York, US.