Mark Sengbusch 

One River School Port Jefferson

“Softer Lines”

Detroit 1997. College for Creative Studies BFA. I learned about the Greats. Rauschenberg, Stella, Annie Albers, Riley, Marden. I was urban spelunking in Detroit and going to Raves. Architecture of the city – Warehouses, pot holes, churches. Objects were the key. Lines of buildings, bricks, I-beams – the components of said objects. I saw and felt the edges of things. Old pulp books with red page edges, ice on the Detroit River. Edge becomes line. I made thousands of drawings and then began making hard Edge paintings highly inspired by the works of my professor Joseph Bernard.

The works in “Softer Lines” began at that time in Undergrad in Detroit. “Gray Light is from 2001”. Then we skip to 2003. 5 tondo paintings from my 101up project where I made 2020 paintings in 20 weeks in Corktown near old Tiger Stadium. The lines and edges continued through Grad School at Cranbrook. In 2009 I made a handful of triangle based works envisioning an Alien Planet with two sources of gravity at 30 degree angles instead of Earth’s vertical gravity. “Is it Luck” and “St. John” are named after favorite songs by Primus and Aerosmith.

Paintings from 2011 and 2012 harken back to the Push and Pull of positive/negative space I was exploring in 2003, still thinking about floor grave designs at Tintern Abbey in Wales. Colors, line and space reference Giant blueprints and also Illuminated manuscripts. I was looking at ancient tools and walking in the snowy Vermont forest.

Right before the pandemic I started making sculptures. After extensive travel in Japan and the Middle East I decided I could stop referencing design and architecture in my paintings and just make sculptures! Temples and shrines in Kyoto. Contemporary buildings in Abu Dhabi inspired by Islamic patterns. Iranian tiles I saw at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. The sculptures I make are equally inspired by my travels but also by childhood toys and video games. Colors of Nintendo, Nerf and baseball cards.

The most recent works in the show are Wooden tile paintings. These are a return to flat patterns and unfold the shapes of my sculptures. The tiles are both line divided into shapes/bricks but also objects assembled where edges kiss to make lines. I was looking at mixed up brick sidewalks in Seoul and Abu Dhabi.

The 23 year span of works in the show are evidence that the tying bonds in my art are the edges of things, sometimes sharp like tin can lids but more often soft like a smooth skipping stone found near a waterfall in the Catskills. When you step back, relax and blur your eyes you see the Softer lines.