Monya Rowe Gallery is very pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Mark Schubert titled White Cave and Vertical Clouds.

For this exhibition, Schubert has created a large-scale sculpture titled White Cave (2010) comprised of mostly found wood, debris, plaster, and burlap. As the title suggests, the sculpture itself emulates the shape of a cave, where upon viewers can actually step in to an empty white space with only electrical lights. This calm, yet claustrophobic, area is a contrast to the outside of the structure, which is chaotic, clumsy and precarious. Wood pieces are aggressively nailed together in-between improvised bulbous hand-sculpted abstract forms made from plaster. The twisting and reconfiguring creates tension and anxiety while the inside is a safe-haven – an escape.

Schubert’s sculptures, often operating under the pretense of haphazard, are carefully considered compositions that incorporate a formal rigor and elegance to temper the violence emanating from each construction. In a number of ways, Schubert is exploring the poetic relationship between space and form, the body and architecture. Psychologically charged and sexually suggestive, the pictorial and structural rudiments retreat and advance with subtle confidence as White Cave is viewed from side-to-side and in-and–out.

The surface composition, while heavily driven by psychological explorations, is also a subtle comment on the overlooked, the used and the physicality of objects themselves. In reshaping an object that already exists Schubert redefines its’ meaning; remnants of disposable objects such as balloons and beer labels become symbols of consumerism, childhood and adulthood. Even though the work inadvertently commands a socio-political dialogue, Schubert is not overly concerned with directly commenting on consumer consumption, but rather how the objects themselves relate to space.

Accompanying White Cave (2010) is a series of sculptural paintings titled Vertical Cloud (2009). Here, Schubert invites the viewer’s eye to engage directly with the surface material on a more intimate level. Comprised of resin, enamel and acrylic on burlap the paintings contain hand-sculpted forms that act as the paint itself. Reminiscent of clouds, these white shapes set against various bright hues, are deliberately goofy, yet careful and spirited, giving the paintings their own strange aesthetic resonance.

Mark Schubert received a BFA from University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin and completed graduate coursework in Painting at University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa. His work has recently been exhibited at Monya Rowe Gallery and NADA Invisible Projects in Brooklyn, NY. The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) recently awarded Schubert with an Artist Fellowship. Schubert lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.