New York, NY: 10 April 2013 - Sperone Westwater is pleased to present Mark Greenwold’s first exhibition at the gallery. Given the extreme nature of Greenwold’s painting process, the slowness and deliberation with which the paintings are made, he shows rarely; his first exhibition in New York in 1979 consisted of a single small painting that took him three years to complete.

On view will be the last seven years of Greenwold’s production, smallish labor intensive paintings and drawings that depict couples and individuals in situations of familial and social complexity that has rarely been the subject of painting in the latter part of the twentieth century. The artist claims to be painting “fictions,” not what happened, but what might have happened. In today’s increasingly literal-minded times, people often conflate this complexity of the real and the imagined. Greenwold seems to revel in misunderstandings: pictorial, spatial, psychological… a blurring and fragmenting that he has characterized recently as an “emotional cubism.” The title of the show Murdering the World expresses Greenwold’s ambition, like most artists’, to remake things. His artistic heroes are visionaries – Andrei Tarkovsky, William Blake, and Bob Dylan – but his sensibility is very much of this moment, highly keyed to the quotidian.

Greenwold was born in 1942 in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from Indiana University. Greenwold’s work has been in numerous recent group exhibitions, including SITE Santa Fe’s 5th International Biennial, curated by Robert Storr (2004) as well as shows held at the Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile (2006); National Academy Museum, New York (2007); and Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (2008). He has been the recipient of various awards since 1985; recent ones include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Francis J. Greenburger Foundation (2001); the Eric Eisenberger Annual Prize, National Academy of Design, New York (2007), and the Jimmy Ernst Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2008). His work is in many public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; National Academy Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; and Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City.

A full-color, illustrated, 60-page catalogue, featuring an interview with the artist by Carroll Dunham, will be published on the occasion of the exhibition. There will be a reception for the artist on 10 May from 6 - 8 pm. For more information as well as images, please contact Aurelia Rauch at +1 212 999 7337 or aurelia@speronewestwater.com.