Mark van Yetter at VI, VII

Artist: Mark van Yetter

Exhibition title: Relentless Compassion

Venue: VI, VII, Oslo, Norway

Date: November 11 – December 20, 2015

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and VI, VII, Oslo

VI, VII is thrilled to announce Relentless Compassion, Mark van Yetter’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.

Van Yetter presents new paintings hinting towards themes that range from domestic abuse to the Mexican drug cartel. Throughout the exhibition, 12 works line the walls. Disrupting this flow of variegated painting, a black wall displays two works of identical format rendered in white paint on black paper. An ambience of erie twilight pervades both. A scene of disquieting isolation: a figure wanders at the horizon; a snake and a skull symbolically hark back to death and original sin.

In the adjacent work two men peer into an terrarium. Again, a snake is set in the foreground. The same dramatic atmosphere prevails. One of the figures is sticking his tongue out both mimicking and mocking the snake. The scene is viewed from the vantage point of within the terrarium. As the show may be interpreted as an allusive story that shifts focus rapidly, this black wall emerges as the final chapter, one that realigns each previous subject into a scope of personal reflection.

– Mohammed Fadel Dobbous

Mark van Yetter (b. 1978, Poconos, USA) lives and works between Istanbul and Berlin. Van Yetter co-founded exhibition space Marquise Dance Hall in 2007, which started as a book and record store in New York, before transitioning to an itinerant gallery, now based in Istanbul.

Previous solo and two-person exhibitions include: ‘Meek Commandments,’ VI, VII, Oslo; ‘Dismal Plight,’ with Jonas Lipps at Cleopatra’s, New York; ‘Class Action,’ PlazaPlaza, London; ‘Perceptual Vigilance,’ Galerie Micky Schubert, Berlin; Mark van Yetter, Alex Zachary, New York and ‘Intolerance To Contemporary Life,’ HOTEL, London.

Group exhibitions include: ‘Like a Virgin,’ VI, VII, Oslo; and ‘Against Interpretation,’ Studio Voltaire, London.

Van Yetter’s work will be the focus of a solo exhibition at the Kunsthall Stavanger in February 2016.