Marc Trujillo: American Purgatory • Exhibition Catalogue ☆ VG Hardcover

Marc Trujillo: American Purgatory

Catalogue produced to accompany the exhibition at Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. Edited by Bryan Granger. Forward by Mark Sloan. Essays by Robert Storr, Bryan Granger, Rachel Magnus, and Chris Ware.

Published by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, 2019.

Hardcover, 163 pages. VG. Clean, square, and bright. Mild rubbing to boards; spine foot lightly bumped, small ding to bottom edge. Free of markings.


9781532384653


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AMERICAN PURGATORY

The paintings of Marc Trujillo portray quotidian scenes: fast food restaurants, big box store aisles, the long terminal corridors of airports, and so on. The scenes are remarkably unremarkable. In their ubiquitous nature, the paintings present an anti-place: scenes that refer not to a specific place, but to uncannily similar tableaus that unfold everyday in communities across America. While Trujillo models his paintings after specific locations, usually in the Los Angeles area, his scenes appear strikingly similar to viewers' own relationships with local commerce. His paintings critique a hallmark of modern capitalism: one that aims to recreate identical commercial experiences across the country.

Trujillo's work is also influenced by his interest in Flemish landscape painting. The expansive skies in his works reflect the panoramic views in Johannes Vermeer's View of Delft, 1661 or the more imaginative Landscape with the Flight into Egypt, c. 1650, by Aelbert Cuyp. Like Vermeer's canvas, which offers a contemporaneous view of a growing city of Delft, Trujillo's paintings explore our own ever-changing - and increasingly homogenous- landscape.

With the title American Purgatory, Trujillo's exhibition presents a body of work in which each painting locates a place that's not a place.