About Mark Dean Veca
Mark Dean Veca fuses art-historical and pop-cultural references in his loud, large-scale murals, ink and acrylic paintings on canvas, and drawings, often borrowing from 18th-century French toile-style patterns to produce organic forms, psychedelic landscapes, and surreal cartoons. Forms that resemble brains, intestines, and other visceral anatomical references populate his imagery, as well as cartoon characters such as Popeye and Kelloggs’ Tony the Tiger. For Phantasmagoria (2008), a site-specific installation, Veca filled a gallery space with waves of orange, red, and white abstract forms outlined in black, a design that took a year to plan and 17 days to create. “The imagery that emerges in my work seems to happen on a subconscious level; I just start improvising and that’s what comes out,” he says.