Preview: Mark Francis: Arena at Abbot Hall Art Gallery

8:50am Friday 19th March 2010

By Adrian Mullen

A BIG hitter from the ‘Brit Art’ clique has put Abbot Hall Art Gallery firmly in the spotlight.

Mark Francis is allied with the Damien Hirst crowd and his first exhibition in Cumbria, Arena, runs at Abbot Hall Art Gallery until July 3.

His work featured in Saatchi’s controversial Sensation: Young British Artist show in 1997, which caused uproar among the public and media and included images of Myra Hindley and the Virgin Mary as well as Hirst’s Shark installation.

London-based, Mark’s ‘hot property’ but remains distant enough from the YBA’s infamous core to have forged his unique style and reputation and his Kendal show has focused the eyes of the nation’s arts world on Kendal.

It follows on from his highly acclaimed solo show at the Hugh Lane, Municipal Gallery, Dublin.

“Of course I’m pleased with the early interest in the exhibition,” said head of the gallery’s publicity and marketing Jeanette Edgar.

“It is always reassuring to attract the national attention, but I hope it is never taken for granted locally just how significance each exhibition at the gallery is.

“The recent Basil Beattie exhibition attracted one Beattie enthusiast who flew in from Germany just for the day while a Kendal resident came only days after it had finished and was disappointed to have missed it.”

Born in Newtownards, County Down, in 1962, Mark first became known in the early 1990s for his seductive paintings of magnified cells and microbes.

His unusual approach to abstract painting has found him a permanent place in the prestigious Saatchi and Tate collections, and work is also featured in the collections of other high profile art houses such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, in New York, the de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, and the Museum of Modern Art, Miami.

In his new set of paintings, Mark explores the grid format in a much more obvious fashion.

Previously, it has always appeared through the brushing in vertical and horizontal marks, subtlely in the background.

The more evident appearance has come through inspiration from sound graphs, musical notation and astronomical diagrams such as spectrographs.

It is almost as if the artist has turned the paintings inside out, to reveal a more robust structure rather than the paintings previous veiled softness.

Francis’s other solo exhibitions include the City Art Gallery, Manchester, in 1995, and he was included in the much-debated exhibition of art from the Saatchi Collection 'Sensation', at the Royal Academy in London and the Brooklyn Academy in New York, and in the touring exhibition Absolut Vision: New British Painting in the 1990s.

Mark Francis: Arena is at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, from 20 March - 3 July 2010.