Good Vibes, installation view at Tokyo Diaspora Contemporary Art project, Tokyo, Japan. On view by appointment.
The story of Mark Dean Veca’s art is fundamentally about forging unlikely unions between experiences that are, if not opposites, certainly oppositional. Over the course of his 30 years making art, he has produced murals, paintings, drawings, installations, sculptures, prints, designs, and other sundry inventions. Along the way, he has experimented with a range of visual styles from the loose and abstract to the obsessive and meticulous; mastering the power of the confident line and discovering the patience required for meticulous detail and the bravado for a super-saturated palette. And though the scale and scope of his work have expanded toward the operatic, his process has never been more intimate. An omnivorous observer of visual culture equally versed in Mad Magazine and Modernist theory, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and French Regency, R. Crumb and Ed Ruscha, Mark Dean Veca’s art truly is the sum of its paradoxical parts and his particular gift lies in making gorgeous, giddy, glorious sense of those paradoxes.
From the essay
"Mark Dean Veca: Life|Drawing" (2012)
for "Mark Dean Veca: Twenty Years"