painting – Mark Frygell

Tag: painting

Updates 13 march 26
Some process and info on what’s going on.

I’m hard at work with my animated short at the moment. It’s a slow process but very interesting and it gives me alot. Still quite some months until I need to be done but animation might be one of the most time consuming art forms you can get into. Luckaly I already got some guidance and help from Minna Floss and Oskar Aglert.

Once or twice per week I still go to my big studio to work with sculpture and painting. I attached some images that (very poorly in my hallway) documents the first one I finished. They are made of garbage covered in acrylic plaster, cut, sanded and polished. Painting is also coming along nicely with some new work and I’m slowly building up the pieces of a puzzle that I think will come together as a really nice show. In some sense, since my kid was born, I feel like everything is falling in place like I haven’t experienced before.

As for upcoming shows etc I have some stuff coming up in the fall of this year as well as a solo show in Lund at the legendary Krognoshuset early 2027. In spring I will finish a mural att Virserums konsthall outside of Kalmar. I’m making a record design with New York punk band Extream Sports and building a ENORMOUS recording library with my own music in preparation for my next record.

My days are otherwise playing out in a different pace than before and coming home and working is shifting over to coming home and being with my family. I always thought work more = better but I’m slowly getting accustomed to the idea that maybe there is a better way.

On the intellectual side Federico Campagnas texts has helped me alot and given me new excitement to think about my work in a different way. As always with theory, it’s more about connecting than understanding and it was many years since I connected with text in this way.

Other than this the world is on fire. Trump and Netan-yahoo is acting like big insane babies and I find comfort in looking at work by Camille Henrot, Jana Euler and Martin Kippenberg. Nothing ever changes. Leaders are still despicable.
Painting section update

The website got a major update with all most painting series from 2019 until today. I still have a few to add but this will do for now. Check the Painting section on the website! Ciao for now!

Above, “Connected” Oil on canvas, 2020, 60×45 cm
Iterative Fantasies

Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Paris, France, 2022

Consisting of a series of paintings made during 2021-2022 utilizing the early AI image generation technology.
A prompt, later the title of each work, was used to batch create hundreds of AI images in google colab. Out of the images generated, I selected around 50 and printed them on drawing paper at a very high opacity. Then reworking them using graphite and eventually making them into large scale oils based on my drawings. I wanted to use the AI slop as a way to view the figurative image another way and find new pathways. At a time where everyone was worried how AI would kill the image, it felt necessary to approach the technology as creative way where I could view it more as an assistant than a threat.
“Monochrome” paintings and sculptures 2021

Work from 2021 for Market Art Fair in stockholm that year. The sculptures are small, except for the turquaise figure holding a round box, and made in pigmented acrylic plaster.Paintings are oil, 120×90 cm each.
2018 works on paper (50 x 64 cm)
Medium sized paper works from 2018 (as well as late 2017). All oil on paper.
Mack Portfolio

Download

This is the PDF portfolio presentation of my time at the Mack Art Foundation 2024/25. It shows most of my paintings, and some of my drawing in the background, from my time over in NYC.
21 aug 25

Studio at the moment. Made this bigger explosion/tree. I like that symbol. When I was 15 I played in a punk band (at that time named Rabid Grannies) in Umeå and my friend Patrik Lindmark @patsible who played bass drew the cover for our first demo. He made this Jan Lööf inspired post-apocalyptic landscape with a nuclear explosion and ever since then it has been the image of that kind of explosion to me.

About a year ago I made a drawing of one that my friend and artist college Lisa Trogen Devgun @lisatrogendevgun got. Some months after that I was in the NYC recidency at Mack Art Foundation and made another one as a small oil painting. Half a year after that, on the year day of the despicable atrocities of United States in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, renowned art critic Jerry Saltz posted a defense for the American actions on that day, saying any other option maybe would have been worse or some garbage like that, you can read for yourself and make up your mind.

The nuclear bomb is like a symbol for the terrorism of the major players of the global competition in-between nations. It is the strong arm of “the man”. A weapon sophisticated enough to never fall under the category of terror act since it takes a complex society to produce and deploy. Instead it is that beat down from the billy club to make sure people stay in line. A demonstration of absolute power. It is sick and gross.

I think I always liked that picture that Patrik drew because it somehow was drawn in the opposite representation of what that bomb is. Instead it was a silly cloud, somewhat toy-looking and cartoonish. It was Dante’s inferno roasted by a top act comedian.

This painting is a bit of a mess, doesn’t contain the same detail as my most recent paintings, but I think it suits it. For me it’s like a homage to that small cassette tape cover that we copied over and over again in our boyrooms mixed with the new cold war we live in today. A youth fantasy turned into reality.