is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Marc Selwyn Fine Art. Recent group exhibitions include MoMA PS1, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Dieu Donné in New York, the Orlando Museum, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He is also on the MFA faculty at Bard College. MFA 2003
Tomorrow's Forecast: Strikingly Clear, 2008
Oil on canvas
74 x 58.25 in.
Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
In his work Marc Handelman revisits the nineteenth century romanticism of Hudson River School painters such as Thomas Cole and Frederic E. Church. Rather than taking the pure, untouched wilderness as his subject, Handelman appropriates imagery of blazing sunsets from magazine advertisements for military and defense organizations. Handelman layers images of sunsets on top of a fragmented corporate logo, using a transfer process that is both additive and subtractive. The painting's title, Tomorrow's Forecast: Strikingly Clear, is taken from an advertisement for the defense technology corporation Northrop Grumman. Handelman's work taps into the original advertisers' desire to illustrate a level of control over nature, while his work nevertheless reveals nature as co-opted towards martial ends.
Force Multiplier, 2008
Oil on canvas
67 x 54 in.
Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Similarly to his work Tomorrow's Forecast: Strikingly Clear on view in this exhibition, Marc Handelman's abstracted and layered paintings of sunsets reveal the manipulation and corruption of natural resources for political aims. The artist's transfer technique not only speaks to the latter, but also recalls the idealistic view of untamed nature adopted by the Hudson River School. In an artist statement, he explains that the landscape imagery and corporate logos are "essentially...the same thing, part of a similar kind of speech. Beyond their both being part of corporate representation, I have thought about both of these kinds of images as modes of masking or veneers, but the correspondence is more poetic, more visual, and in these paintings more material."
