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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