Mark Dean Veca: Graphia

About

Many of Veca’s most  recent paintings and sculptures riff on portraiture and popular culture. A series of brightly-colored large-scale paintings depict cartoon characters from Looney Tunes and Rick and Morty as writhing biomorphic organisms. The smaller scale sculptures take the form of found objects- vintage plastic piggy banks shaped like busts of Disney characters, for example, hand painted in a blue and white Delft mode that transports them from their squeaky-clean origins firmly into the psychedelic realm. Other paintings reference the American flag, toile de jouy patterning, and mandalas. Some are purely abstract. The common threads among all the works in the exhibition are the use of  fine, idiosyncratic  linework and a conflation of high and low art.

Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and raised in Livermore, California, Veca received his BFA in painting from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. He has exhibited throughout the North America, Europe and Japan at institutions such as the San Jose Museum of Art, The Orange County Museum of Art, MoMA PS 1, The Crocker Art Museum, The Drawing Center,  and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. 

Veca’s public artwork Miracle of La Brea, commissioned by LA Metro for a station at Wilshire and La Brea in Los Angeles, will open in 2024. Amongst his many honors, he was awarded the John S. Knudsen Prize in 2018, the C.O.L.A Individual Artist Fellowship in 2011, named Honoree of the Jennifer Howard Coleman Distinguished Lectureship and Residency at Otis College of Art and Design in 2008, received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2006, and has thrice received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in painting.

For more information please contact Mika Cho via email at mcho@calstatela.edu or by phone at 323-343-4022.