WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIF.- Denenberg Gallery is presenting an exhibition of recent work of well-known Los Angeles artist Marc Pally. The exhibition will continue through May 31, 2024.
Pally waited for a distinctive opportunity to present a new body of work from the past several years. After exhibiting for two decades, with his last show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in 2005, he focused on curatorial efforts in the public art field, working with artists such as Todd Gray, Renee Green, Jenny Holzer, Michael McMillen, Nam June Paik, Steve Roden and Jennifer Steinkamp, including serving as Artistic Director for all three iterations of GLOW, the internationally acclaimed program of installations on the Santa Monica beach. Pally’s new work, 2017-2024, features paintings on wood panels and framed drawings.
Pally is among the few contemporary artists selected to exhibit at Denenberg, a private gallery widely known for museum quality American and International art. The gallery’s unique brutalist architectural landmark was designed by architects Lloyd Wright and Michael Morrison, and offers an intimate viewing environment very near Rosamund Felsen’s former gallery, within sight of the Pacific Design Center in the heart of West Hollywood.
Constance Mallinson, in the catalog essay produced for this exhibition, describes Pally’s iconography:
… the art of Marc Pally elicits a sense of life from the micro to the macroscopic. Luminous fields of paint contain forms brimming with dense graphite scribbles, fine patterns, and swirly mark making and serve as the ground for Pally’s exploration of the morphological similarities and interdependencies of organic and non-organic forms. An imaginary realm of inventive human and non-human shapes, the associations seem endless: finely veined leaves, hairy roots, mycelia, vital organs, helical and molecular chains, drapey vines, amoebas, planaria, cross sections of plant and animal tissue, insects, reptiles, sea creatures, algae, entrails, protozoa, geodes, ancient figurative petroglyphs, and more. Such references are abundant in aptly titled works like From Here to There (2022) and Right Here (2021) in which clusters of marks simultaneously evoke tiny cells and galactic events. In many of the works, delicate filaments and cilia-like threads mimic vibrational waves and suggest mysterious connecting forces and attractions between such spheres of life.
Pally’s work is in numerous museum collections including the Hammer Museum, MOCA (Los Angeles), LACMA, San Jose Museum of Art, and Orange County Museum of Art. A soft-bound full color catalogue will be available with all exhibition images illustrated, together with an essay by Los Angeles artist/writer, Constance Mallinson. The exhibition is being curated by Randy Sommer, independent curator, the former co-owner of ACME gallery in Los Angeles.
