The first solo museum exhibition of Houston-based artist Mark Flood, Another Painting features key examples of the artist’s recent text, lace, and corporate logo paintings. With a deadpan and confrontational tone, Flood’s work interrogates the verbal, visual, and written language of institutions—such as government, Wall Street, and the art market—that influence everyday life. Appropriating the vernacular of these establishments, Flood seeks to reveal what he believes to be their inherent absurdity and desire to control.

In his text-based paintings, Flood stencils imperatives onto various materials, including cardboard, canvases, vintage metal signs, and even World War II training missiles. Acerbic wordplay and satirical statements—such as “FEEL NOTHING,” “UNFRIEND YOUR PARENTS,” and “VOTE DEMON REPLICANT”—incite viewers to create their own, more daring interpretations of the messages that pervade our consumer culture. Similarly, Flood’s logo paintings overlay corporate emblems and seals of government agencies on crackled, disintegrating surfaces, perhaps reflecting a fracturing capitalist facade.

In Flood’s now iconic lace paintings, the artist stencils paint-soaked, torn lace onto the canvas, simultaneously destroying and memorializing the tattered fabric. The paintings merge the beautiful and the abject. Flood transforms lace—a textile historically linked to the decorative arts—into a charged presence that is at once corporeal, surgical, and sculptural.

Mark Flood (b. 1957, Houston, Texas) lives and works in Houston. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Zach Feuer Gallery, New York; Peres Projects, Berlin; Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich; and Stuart Shave Modern Art, London. His work has been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions, including shows at Galerie Perrotin, Paris; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art; and Marlborough Gallery, New York. In 2009 Flood’s work was featured at REMAP2, Athens, Greece, during the Athens Biennale. Flood received the Engelhard Award in 1991 and is represented in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Mark Flood: Another Painting is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Jeffrey Uslip, Chief Curator.