Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to present Mark Gonzales: Coltureal Affairs, curated by artist Rita Ackermann. This is Gonzales’ fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Included are 24 works representing 25 years of Mark Gonzales’ painting and drawing practice. From representational imagery to text-based works, Rita Ackermann’s curation describes Gonzales’ commitment to themes relating to spirituality, love, and death – all expressed in the artist’s characteristically freewheeling, intuitive style. In a colloquial nod to skate culture, Gonzales’ unpolished attitude suggests reclamation of the countercultural qualities associated with this subculture. Gonzales’ poetry, simultaneously impulsive and profound, ranging from sensitive to fierce, painted on canvas and reproduced in his countless self-published zines, is often rendered using “automatic spelling” and invented syntax.

As Ackermann states:

Mark’s grammar mistakes are great! Because they open the gates to look at the meaning of the word from another angle. What first looks like a misspelled word can turn out to be a revelation or social justice. An unfinished sentence with misspellings warns you not to trust in educated language that often shields the truth or is empty of meaning.

Mark’s art is simple and direct like his poetry: it is blown by one breath, sometimes even crooked, as if he would have made it between two flips and landed on one foot. It makes you laugh but it is dead serious. That is something only the great originals can do.

In the fake world of influencers where culture becomes a transactional commodity, the spelling mistake “coltureal affairs” invites you into the mind of a game changer who mastered falling and conquered failing to become a timeless hero for the searchers.

For the installation of this exhibition, Ackermann has engaged Gonzales in a mural project. The works flow freely throughout the gallery, hung on alternating black and white walls, each canvas surrounded by a painted, cartoon-like image of a picture frame that Gonzales has created in direct response to the imagery.

Mark Gonzales’ response to both art and life embodies a philosophy of perpetual motion: nothing stagnates; everything connects and continues. As a teenager in Los Angeles in the 1980s, Gonzales (b. 1968, South Gate, CA) became known for his genre-defining skateboarding which involved an unprecedented approach to skating in the built environment – so much so that he invented and executed tricks in locations that are now so core to the sport they continue to bear his name. Gonzales’ relationship to skating is inextricably tied to his practice as a poet, painter, illustrator, filmmaker, actor, and designer – all of which define his role as a cultural icon.