SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Ruiz-Healy Art, San Antonio, Texas, is presenting a solo exhibition of paintings and watercolors by Mark Schlesinger. The show, titled “Hello Stranger(s), opened on Wednesday January 24 and will be on view through March 10, 2018.

In the exhibition catalogue, Michael Schreyach, Associate Professor of Art History at Trinity University and author of Pollock’s Modernism (Yale University Press, 2017) writes, “Schlesinger’s imagery is motivated on some fundamental level by his sense of the possibilities of representing, through abstract pictorial form, the body’s infinitely variable modes of touching, feeling, and being.”

As a painter whose work concentrates on an exploration of lines, planes, and shapes, Schlesinger is enthralled with the formal elements of painting such as color and the visual tactility of material. He is especially known for creating his own paint for whatever support and ground he is using, from unconventional studio paints for use on traditional materials such as canvas, linen, and wood, to new paints for unusual materials such as plastic, stone, and concrete.

For this exhibition, Schlesinger created a matte acrylic polymer paint that looks like wax when it dries. Using this medium to glue raw canvas to a flat faced wooden frame rather than stapling it to a beveled edged stretcher, cutting out shapes from raw canvas and then gluing each to the canvas support, Schlesinger begins each of these paintings with a declared and structured composition. From this expressed intention and through the process of discovering the spatial conflicts effected by contrasts of color, texture, shape, and form, Schlesinger patiently looks for the unexpected painterly event which when explored allows the painting in turn, to come to him.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, as a graduate from Harpur College, Schlesinger participated in the Whitney Museum of Art’s Independent Study Program. Living and working in New York City, he was Lee Krasner’s studio assistant as he began and developed his career. In 1979, his paintings were included in “American Painting: The Eighties” curated by Barbara Rose, and has been exhibited in New York, nationally, and internationally since then.

His paintings are included in many private and public collections, including The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, The Newark Museum, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, The European Fine Art Foundation in Geneva, and in Texas, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The San Antonio Museum of Art, and The McNay Art Museum, as well as corporate collections including the Progressive Corporation and AT&T. Schlesinger received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1995, and in 1996, was awarded a resident fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation for its study center in Bellagio, Italy.

In 2004, after moving to San Antonio, Texas, he had a mid-career solo show at Westfaelischer Kunstverein in Muenster, Germany, entitled Paintings 1993-2003 New York-Texas. Dr. Carina Plath, Deputy Director and Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany curated the exhibition.

From 2008 to 2013, Schlesinger expanded his studio practice and worked exclusively on large outdoor public paintings, including two bridges spanning the San Antonio River, a 1.2-mile streetscape, and a two-block-long painting in Georgetown, Texas, which incorporated a sloping retaining wall and its adjacent sidewalks and staircase. In 2010, his public painting on the 9th Street Bridge over the San Antonio River was awarded the Best Public Project of the last 10 years by the Downtown Alliance of San Antonio.

In 2013, Schlesinger began working in a new studio in San Antonio and returned to more human sized paintings. This is his first gallery show in over 11 years and his first with Ruiz-Healy Art.