January 18 - March 1, 2025, Tue-Sat, 10am-5:30pm
Visiting the Louvre in 1993, Mark Stock was mesmerized by "The Magdalene with the Smoking Flame." The 17th century religious scene was a world apart from Stock's depictions of trysting lovers and despondent butlers. Yet the tour de force by Georges de La Tour anticipated Stock's paintings in ways that became more apparent the longer he gazed.
Returning to his Oakland studio, Stock paid tribute to de La Tour's candles. Painting their portraits in a series of large canvases, the candles became characters as romantic as his lovers and as forlorn as his butlers. Stock also introduced candles into his own artwork, letting them narrate the film noir plotlines that increasingly occupied his work.
An incisive retrospective at Modernism shows highlights dating back to 1984, when Stock started to explore the narrative potential of contemporary figurative painting and began to develop characters including his ever-evolving butler.
Stock also drew inspiration from Charlie Chaplin, who showed Stock how to convey his feelings through an alter ego. "When I was in turmoil and painted myself as the butler," Stock told the writer Barnaby Conrad III, "I felt I was making a painting the way Chaplin would make a film. The butler is the Tramp and the Tramp is the butler, and I'm the butler too."
Featured butler paintings demonstrate Stock's talent for communicating emotion through gestures and facial expressions - showing the unrequited yearnings of servants in love with those a class above them - while the trompe l'oeil series highlights Stock's remarkable blend of technical mastery and conceptual audacity.
From Stock's perspective, the theater was as imbued with theatricality off stage as much as under the spotlight. With the film noir intrigues he evoked in paintings, he created backstage tableaux that could be interpreted in myriad ways, all dramatically unresolved. Like Stock standing in front of "The Magdalena," all we can do is to continue looking in wonder.
Free
Presented by MODERNISM INC..
show less
Visiting the Louvre in 1993, Mark Stock was mesmerized by "The Magdalene with the Smoking Flame." The 17th century religious scene was a world apart from Stock's depictions of trysting lovers and despondent butlers. Yet the tour de force by Georges de La Tour anticipated Stock's paintings in ways that became more apparent the longer he gazed.
Returning to his Oakland studio, Stock paid tribute to de La Tour's candles. Painting their portraits in a series of large canvases, the candles became characters as romantic as his lovers and as forlorn as his butlers. Stock also introduced candles into his own artwork, letting them narrate the film noir plotlines that increasingly occupied his work.
An incisive retrospective at Modernism shows highlights dating back to 1984, when Stock started to explore the narrative potential of contemporary figurative painting and began to develop characters including his ever-evolving butler.
Stock also drew inspiration from Charlie Chaplin, who showed Stock how to convey his feelings through an alter ego. "When I was in turmoil and painted myself as the butler," Stock told the writer Barnaby Conrad III, "I felt I was making a painting the way Chaplin would make a film. The butler is the Tramp and the Tramp is the butler, and I'm the butler too."
Featured butler paintings demonstrate Stock's talent for communicating emotion through gestures and facial expressions - showing the unrequited yearnings of servants in love with those a class above them - while the trompe l'oeil series highlights Stock's remarkable blend of technical mastery and conceptual audacity.
From Stock's perspective, the theater was as imbued with theatricality off stage as much as under the spotlight. With the film noir intrigues he evoked in paintings, he created backstage tableaux that could be interpreted in myriad ways, all dramatically unresolved. Like Stock standing in front of "The Magdalena," all we can do is to continue looking in wonder.
Free
Presented by MODERNISM INC..
January 18 - March 1, 2025, Tue-Sat, 10am-5:30pm
Visiting the Louvre in 1993, Mark Stock was mesmerized by "The Magdalene with the Smoking Flame." The 17th century religious scene was a world apart from Stock's depictions of trysting lovers and despondent butlers. Yet the tour de force by Georges de La Tour anticipated Stock's paintings in ways that became more apparent the longer he gazed.
Returning to his Oakland studio, Stock paid tribute to de La Tour's candles. Painting their portraits in a series of large canvases, the candles became characters as romantic as his lovers and as forlorn as his butlers. Stock also introduced candles into his own artwork, letting them narrate the film noir plotlines that increasingly occupied his work.
An incisive retrospective at Modernism shows highlights dating back to 1984, when Stock started to explore the narrative potential of contemporary figurative painting and began to develop characters including his ever-evolving butler.
Stock also drew inspiration from Charlie Chaplin, who showed Stock how to convey his feelings through an alter ego. "When I was in turmoil and painted myself as the butler," Stock told the writer Barnaby Conrad III, "I felt I was making a painting the way Chaplin would make a film. The butler is the Tramp and the Tramp is the butler, and I'm the butler too."
Featured butler paintings demonstrate Stock's talent for communicating emotion through gestures and facial expressions - showing the unrequited yearnings of servants in love with those a class above them - while the trompe l'oeil series highlights Stock's remarkable blend of technical mastery and conceptual audacity.
From Stock's perspective, the theater was as imbued with theatricality off stage as much as under the spotlight. With the film noir intrigues he evoked in paintings, he created backstage tableaux that could be interpreted in myriad ways, all dramatically unresolved. Like Stock standing in front of "The Magdalena," all we can do is to continue looking in wonder.
Free
Presented by MODERNISM INC..
read more
Visiting the Louvre in 1993, Mark Stock was mesmerized by "The Magdalene with the Smoking Flame." The 17th century religious scene was a world apart from Stock's depictions of trysting lovers and despondent butlers. Yet the tour de force by Georges de La Tour anticipated Stock's paintings in ways that became more apparent the longer he gazed.
Returning to his Oakland studio, Stock paid tribute to de La Tour's candles. Painting their portraits in a series of large canvases, the candles became characters as romantic as his lovers and as forlorn as his butlers. Stock also introduced candles into his own artwork, letting them narrate the film noir plotlines that increasingly occupied his work.
An incisive retrospective at Modernism shows highlights dating back to 1984, when Stock started to explore the narrative potential of contemporary figurative painting and began to develop characters including his ever-evolving butler.
Stock also drew inspiration from Charlie Chaplin, who showed Stock how to convey his feelings through an alter ego. "When I was in turmoil and painted myself as the butler," Stock told the writer Barnaby Conrad III, "I felt I was making a painting the way Chaplin would make a film. The butler is the Tramp and the Tramp is the butler, and I'm the butler too."
Featured butler paintings demonstrate Stock's talent for communicating emotion through gestures and facial expressions - showing the unrequited yearnings of servants in love with those a class above them - while the trompe l'oeil series highlights Stock's remarkable blend of technical mastery and conceptual audacity.
From Stock's perspective, the theater was as imbued with theatricality off stage as much as under the spotlight. With the film noir intrigues he evoked in paintings, he created backstage tableaux that could be interpreted in myriad ways, all dramatically unresolved. Like Stock standing in front of "The Magdalena," all we can do is to continue looking in wonder.
Free
Presented by MODERNISM INC..
show less
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724 Ellis Street, San Francisco, CA 94121
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