Mark Dean Veca

Mark Dean Veca was born in Shreveport, Louisiana and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in 1985. Veca has exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan at institutions such as The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. His work has been reviewed in numerous publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art Review, Juxtapoz, and Flash Art. Veca is conducting one-on-one master critiques with undergraduate and graduate Fine Arts students at Otis College of Art and Design in the fall of 2008 as part of the Jennifer Howard Coleman Distinguished Lectureship and Residency. He currently lives in Los Angeles and his next solo exhibition is scheduled to open Sept. 18 at Western Project

Veca is known for creating paintings, drawings and installations that portray surreal cartoons, psychedelic landscapes, and pop culture iconography while also being inspired by long-established decorative motifs. He is widely recognized for his all-encompassing installations that surround the viewer and incite a sense of awe. Revealing fantastical, humorous, aggressive, or sexual imagery with both frenzy and pattern-like precision, his works often recall a modernized type of toile painting. In the 1998 catalogue for Veca’s El Gloominator exhibition, Steve Mitchell asserts, “Veca works in the meticulous tradition of the fresco painter to produce an image that paradoxically evokes the immediacy of the graffiti artist.” Carlo McCormick states in a Juxtapoz magazine article that within the artist’s installation work, “confines create ideas, obstacles dictate illusions, and the proliferation of optic information ignites a kind of brain-searing explosion.” In 2004, Veca was commissioned by Nike to design an installation as well as a limited edition product series. Entitled Pulsation, the work was exhibited at 255 in New York. Veca’s most recent solo exhibition, Imbroglio (October 20 – November 17, 2007), was held at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery and was his most ambitious New York exhibition thus far. Veca presented 17 new paintings on panel, which were incorporated into an installation.[