The Evolution of Mark-Making

Exhibition Website

Jan 28 2017 - May 14 2017

Rich with significant examples of both gestural abstraction and post-painterly abstraction, the evolution of mark-making rises to the fore as a major theme in MOCA's Permanent Collection. Borne out of modernist painting as well as “action painting”-a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed, or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied-this theme extends to present day, where brushstrokes fade away to innovative mark-making techniques or performance and video.

n 2008, abstract painter Jackie Saccoccio first began an ambitious body of work relating to portraiture. Her “improvisational portraits,” as she refers to them, are borne out of her interest in centrifugal forces in portraits. As she reinterprets portraiture, she researched the materials, such as mica, utilized by Renaissance painters. Evolving the practice, Saccoccio's surfaces are freckled with mica and translucent varnishes, creating multilayered planes of shifting forms. In these large-scale paintings, Saccoccio's process includes tipping, dragging, and shaking the large-scale works over one another, where liquid pools of color, directional lines, and translucent orbs coexist.

Exhibition overview from museum website

  • Painting
  • Contemporary
  • Jackie Saccoccio

Exhibition Venues & Dates