Saenger Galería at GAMA Week 2022

SAENGER GALERÍA is pleased to present Mark Hagen's first exhibition in Mexico City, Color Therapy. Based in Los Angeles, California, Hagen is now represented by SAENGER GALERÍA. Spanning a wide variety of media, such as painting, ceramics, sculptures, and installations Hagen’s practice examines the relationship between systems, self-determination, and expression. His interests include the physical, institutional, and discursive parameters of art, the processes of production, artistic labor, social space and more broadly: repetition, accumulation and the boundaries of human perception among others. Terapia de Color takes its title from an entry in “The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential”, a project initiated in 1972 by the non-profit NGO Union of International Associations (UIA), which ambitiously, systematically and artfully attempts to catalog the woes of humanity as well as the means of alleviating them. Ever since 2016 Hagen has titled his paintings after entries from it´s 1994 edition. In Terapia de Color, Hagen will present a new suite of acrylic paintings on burlap in the artist’s signature anodized titanium frames, as well as new cement screen-like sculptures cast from plumbing connections referencing the gallery’s own conspicuous plumbing and in general referencing systems of distribution and control put to aesthetic ends. As with these screens geometric systems and the grid figure heavily in Hagen’s work as do his many references to the body, embodiedness, and organic forms which prevent his work from being purely formal or abstract and thus isolated from other fields of inquiry. Hagen’s paintings and cement sculptures on view also perform the tension between determinism and freewill. For example as inchoate masses of paint and cement are pushed into molds they meet their limits and become for the artist a mimetic portrait of the gallery itself. Hagen’s new paintings are also a continued elaboration and exploration of painting as both image and object. For this series, silicone molds are made of numerous everyday items, consumer packaging, articles of personal significance (a camping pad for example), and ones chosen for their poetic or symbolic meaning. The result is also the production of self-reflexive objects whose repetitive casting is mirrored in their repetitious shapes, facets, and patterns. The use of molds, in effect, results in the creation of works that are both gestural yet serialized, discreet yet continuous, linear and cyclic, autonomous yet something apart of a totality that is forever “in-potentia.” Finally, Hagen’s artist frames are made by soaking titanium in liquid phosphoric acid (inexplicably found in soft drinks and colas) and then applying electricity at varying voltages. This deposits microscopic layers of transparent crystals that break light up into a rainbow of colors without any dyes or pigments. Here the artist reminds the viewer that their visual perception is limited to the visible spectrum and creates what the artist calls a memento mori to human limitations and biological presets, creating a “frame” of reference.