Portfolio: Laurel Sparks

“Combining the ornate flatness of fin-de-siècle design with the gestural wildness of early Abstract Expressionism, I use theatrical iconography inspired by queer and psychedelic cinema, inventing an aesthetic lexicon that is both flamboyant and haunting.

Androgynous iconoclasts, from Luisa Casati to Ziggy Stardust, act as muses for abstract portraits of glamour and decay. Alluding to these glamorous figures, linear silhouettes of Venetian chandeliers and perverse Christmas trees are commanding figures that shapeshift in layers of ambidextrous blind contour drawing. Spectral Icons form and dissolve within a carnival of cosmetic smears, dissonant color, glitter, and bejeweled protrusions.

Intense gestures celebrate baroque theatricality, costume, and persona. At the same time, raw emptiness contradicts excessive adornment. Within each work there is a painterly call and response between poured white marble dust, bare canvas and decorative pattern. The surfaces oscillate between elegance and vulgarity. Pleasure, elegy, and irreverence co-exist in these paintings like the complex characters of the muses they invoke.”

[wowslider id=”32″]

Laurel Sparks is a Brooklyn based abstract painter. She has exhibited in major solo and group shows at D’Amelio Terras in New York, Dodge Gallery in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, CCS Bard Hessel Museum in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston, DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, and Art in General in New York.