Mark Dagley

This month, we’re delighted to feature the work of Mark Dagley. For the past 20 years Mark has “engaged the fundamentals of abstraction by creating geometric paintings that have the ability to induce psychotropic perceptual experience”. Though Mark is a generation removed from the original Op Artists, he is a well-known and respected practitioner of “neo-optical colour abstraction”.

Mark Dagley and Julian Stanczak October 14, 2010
Mark Dagley and Julian Stanczak October 14, 2010

Mark has exhibited widely at galleries, foundations, and museums throughout the United States and Europe since the mid-1980s. In 1999 his work was included in “Post- Hypnotic”, a three year travelling museum exhibition which examined the resurgence of optical effects in the work of twenty-eight painters from the United States, Europe and Japan. His most recent exhibitions were at Minus Space (2008), Nyehaus (2007), McKenzie Fine Art (2006), Up & Company, (2005).

Concentric Sequence
Mark Dagley
1994
Acrylic and pencil on canvas
72 x 72 inches
Concentric Sequence Mark Dagley 1994 Acrylic and pencil on canvas 72 x 72 inches
Staggered Landscape
Mark Dagley
1994
Acrylic on canvas
50 x 50 inches
Staggered Landscape Mark Dagley 1994 Acrylic on canvas 50 x 50 inches
Primary Color Sequence
Mark Dagley
1995
Acrylic on canvas
75 x 75 inches
Primary Color Sequence Mark Dagley 1995 Acrylic on canvas 75 x 75 inches

The path to Mark’s current work began in the early nineties with a reduction in his palette to the minimal set of red, yellow, blue, black and white.

A series of paintings – ‘Primary sequences’ – created using this minimal colour set and based on simple geometric shapes ensued, but Mark felt that there was something missing; something that had been discarded from the foundation of 20th Century Geometric Art: classical perspective. Starting first with one-point perspective line paintings using the primary colour set, Mark gradually turned his attention to the dead centre of a square canvas, first tracing dots in pencil with a circle template as one long spiral string and then ‘painting in’ these dots using his minimal palette and creating in the process a fascinating optical effect.

“Funny, I never set out to make Op Art. As far as my work is concerned, I much prefer the term systematic painting. The opticality is just the sexy part, the by-product of the real issue at hand, which is structure.”

Cul de Sac
Mark Dagley
1997
Acrylic on canvas
60 x 60 inches
Cul de Sac Mark Dagley 1997 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 60 inches
Secondary Color Vanishing Point
Mark Dagley
2006
Acrylic and pencil on linen
24 x 18 inches
Secondary Color Vanishing Point Mark Dagley 2006 Acrylic and pencil on linen 24 x 18 inches
Lemonheads CD / LP cover for Varshons
Mark Dagley
2009
Lemonheads CD / LP cover for Varshons Mark Dagley 2009

For fans of the Lemonheads… that’s Mark’s painting on the cover of ‘Varshons’. If you’re interested in purchasing any of Mark’s work, there are some very inexpensive prints here. To find out more about Mark and his work, look here. A video of Mark’s Op/kinetic sculpture can be found here

Mark Dagley by

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