Mark Van Wagner

Mark Van Wagner (b. 1959, New York) is an American painter and sculptor whose primary material is sand, collected from beaches and shorelines around the world. In his Drawing From Nowhere series, sand replaces paint as the medium itself, applied to canvas in works that are at once gestural and meditative — sharing the spatter and spontaneity of the Abstract Expressionist tradition with the contemplative character of Tibetan and Native American sand painting. Critic Peter Frank has observed that Van Wagner "paints highly nuanced compositions redolent in their colors and textures," and that some of the paintings reveal a debt "not just to earlier granular modernists but also Monet." A parallel body of layered-relief sculpture extends the same investigations into three dimensions, on recycled cardboard boxes. At once archaeological, geological, and sociological, Van Wagner's work registers the slow processes of accretion, erosion, and decomposition. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Van Wagner has exhibited internationally, including at the Heckscher Museum, and his work is held in the collection of the Rockford Art Museum and in private and corporate collections worldwide.