Pure artist - Mark Prent

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Mark Prent

Pure announces PurePrent - a show of recent sculptures, jewelry and drawings by the oft-censored and controversial artist Mark Prent. PurePrent will spearhead the work of three artists working with often disturbing images along a collective ‘body’ theme.

PurePrent ranges from the life-size body cast sculpture, ‘Bait’, adorned with tentacles and tattoos to the lovingly created fine jewelry and is complemented by original drawings for the works, all along a similar theme.

Born in Poland in 1947 and educated at Sir George Williams university in Montreal, Mark Prent has been the recipient of numerous honours and awards including the John Simon Guggenhiem Memorial Fellowship (1978) and seventeen Canada Council grants. He was honoured in 1978 with an invitation from the Deutsche Akademischer Austauschdienst Guest Artist in Berlin Program, and spent nearly two years in Germany. His work has been exhibited extensively all over the world and his solo shows have been featured at such prestigious institutions as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin; and the Musee d’art Contemporain in Montreal.

Three documentary films have been made in Canada about his work, as well as volumes of newspaper and magazine articles, catalogues and commentaries. He has lectured and taught workshops in hundreds of institutions over the years and continues to do so.

In the early 1980’s Prent moved with his wife to the U.S. and settled in the beautiful Champlain Valley of Vermont where they developed Pink House Studios Inc. as a way of marketing his technical expertise and providing superior products and customer support that he knew, from his own experience, was so badly needed in the field of life-molding.

PurePrent runs from July 31st to August 28th with a reception on August 10th 6 - 8pm.

Artist's Statement

I have been making jewelry for thirty years. All of my jewelry is inspired by materials, images and textures that in some way capture my imagination. Much the same can be said for my sculpture.

I don’t necessarily see a clear distinction between my sculpture and much of the jewelry I have made. In my sculptures, I am striving for a jewel-like quality in the rich treatment I give to surfaces. An example of one of my sculptures that (for me) shares much in common with my jewelry is ‘Tall Tale, Fish Tail, Turn Tail’ which incorporates the octopus tentacles and fish fins that I have often used in jewelry.

The concepts for my sculptures really originate with a taste I have always had for formally intriguing artifacts and curiosities of nature, the material textures, and often the bizarre manner in which they may be integrated with the human form. Most of my work begins with ‘happenstance’, when I discover a particularly evocative object and add it to my collection. Once in that collection, the object continues to pique my imagination until I have found what is for me, the perfect way to reinterpret it in relationship to the human form.

Sculpture

Jewelry

Drawings

Select a thumbnail of a given piece to see it at a fuller size