Mark Innerst, Paintings 1982-2024

July 16 - August 28, 2026
Gallery 3

Michael Kohn Gallery is proud to present a rare and important selection of works by Pictures Generation artist Mark Innerst.  Since the late 70s when he worked in the studio of Robert Longo, Innerst has consistently mined the varied subject matter that became easily accessible in the late media age of the 20th Century.  This proto-digital moment of media expansion foreshadowed the social media explosion of today.
 
Like his contemporaries (Cindy Sherman, Longo, Richard Prince, Sarah Charlesworth) Mark Innerst has been highly influenced by the "roles" and themes that are myriad in the immense world of media. Rather than using photography, Innerst employed a historicizing painting style and an "antique" found-object frame to create detailed and traditionally beautiful, small-scale works of art with an enormous range of subjects.
 
Mark Innerst’s themes and subject matter range from photos pulled from textbooks (Memnon) to TV series of the 1980s (Dallas, Fallon’s Funeral), to many cityscapes that draw inspiration from American painting of the 1920s and 30s.  More recently the imagery expands from the elegant forms of freeway overpasses to the naturalistic forms of sparrows and morning glories.  And throughout Innerst’s widely varied depictions one thing has remained constant:  a facility to paint in a detailed, enamel-like manner that lends to his paintings a Netherlandish quality of bejeweled preciousness…like a modern Vermeer.
 
Mark Innerst works are in the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art, NY, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, and others.

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Mark Innerst, New Paintings

April 6 - May 24, 2018
Gallery 1 & 2

Kohn Gallery is honored to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Mark Innerst, consisting of up to 28 new works, all of which continue the artist’s conceptual investigation into thematic genres of traditional painting.

Innerst broke onto the New York art scene in the early 1980s with exquisitely executed small-scale paintings with hand-made frames, and his works were considered part of the Pictures Generation of artists who employed widely varied images as source material culled from the expanding media of the pre-digital age. In fact, Innerst worked in the studio of Robert Longo, one of the preeminent artists of this group. Innerst would explore subject matter as subject matter in his work, producing oil paintings of landscapes, still lifes, cityscapes, historical scenes, interiors, et al., yet so deftly painted that his works were prized as much for their beauty as their conceptual rigor.

This body of new paintings show Innerst to be at the height of his artistic powers, where the towering buildings of cityscapes are depicted as bejeweled giants that line the lonely canyon of an urban avenue. Elsewhere, a freeway overpass hovers in the air like a modernist sculpture above a highway road, all set against Constable-like clouds and sky. In another work, Innerst produces his own version of a Dutch church interior with a blue-toned study seen from a bird’s eye view of the grand lobby of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, replete with visitors filling the vast space.

Those who are aware of Innerst’s career are familiar with his iconic cityscapes with towering buildings, and this exhibition will present a number of works where the city streets are sometimes geometricized in a nod toward American Modernism. In other works, the subject is delicately portrayed as an equilibrium of realism and romanticism. Finally, some paintings depict city streets and buildings abstracted and reduced to volumetric blocks, adorned with richly colored pointillist dabs of paint.

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