Mark Sadler
Born 1968 in Glasgow, Scotland
Lives and works in Glasgow and Berlin
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No Fixed Abode or Fiction House
1994 was a year of no fixed abode. Hackney was a harbour, an idyll of Asians, Caribbeans and Greeks where one could paint in a bedsit, walk down Mare street in a Shalwar Qamis and live in ecstatic obscurity on the edge of the poverty trap and in the shared company of fellow outsiders. I received visits from Graefin von Jakobsdottir and returned them. If you can survive that level of obscurity from an art world full of clubs and group activity, you can survive anything. Organizing studio visits in the corner of school buildings and responding to the question ‘Where have you been since graduating?’ «Hitchhiking, singing in Aleppo, painting, learning languages, building a sense of world outside the art world. Painting needs time, takes time has time.» No good. If you are not voraciously making your way like pacman round the institutional map, then you might as well not exist. But I did and do wake up daily to existence and move from dark to light between two spaces. A dart of morning light and the yellow haze of a bulb at night. No money honey, only the smell of cooking spice and a shelf full of books in different languages. French, German, Italian, Urdu, Arabic as if once you can master the foreign language you might be less afraid of the stranger, but then my own shadow cast by the lamp on the wall still freaks me out.
I am not « emerging ». I have always been here. I meet my several selves somewhere in the midst of painting; one is a kind of itinerant intellectual who wants to use painting to make a point about history, cultural and language, and the other one is a hollow shell that painting passes through making weird noises as it goes.
Mark Sadler May 2013
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SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2013
Symbolic Ecstatic; Fictionhouse Berlin (with Elín Jakobsdóttir)
Bursting at the Seams Boiling Point of Dreams; Krome Gallery, Berlin (with Elín Jakobsdóttir)
2012
Ecstatic Symbolic; Fiction House, Berlin (with Elín Jakobsdóttir)
Drifting; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (group show)
2011
Hot and Sexual Cold and Dead; Fiction House, Berlin
2010
Paintings Into Sockets; Fiction House, Berlin
Snack Cart Exchange; Fiction House, Berlin
2009
Snack Cart Exchange Cairo; Street project, Cairo
2008
Between Peshawar and Paris; Christian Ehrentraut, Berlin
2002
MFA Show; Tramway, Glasgow (group show)
2001
Des Territoires; l’Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris (curated by Jean Francois Chevrier)
2000
Fiction Paris-Glasgow; la Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris
1997
Between Two Spaces (with Elín Jakobsdóttir); Fiction Gallery Glasgow
AWARDS
2013
British Council Creative Futures Award
2012
British Council Berlin Travel Bursary
2005
Pollock Krasner Award, Pollock Krasner Foundation New York
2003
Professional Development, Grant Scottish Arts Council
1992
Elizabeth Greenshields Award, Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation
1990
Elizabeth Greenshields Award, Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation
EDUCATION
2000-02
MFA Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art
1986-90
BA Hons Drawing and Painting, Glasgow School of Art
RESIDENCIES
2003
Alvarez de Toledo Residency, Marseille
1997-2000
La Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris
TEACHING
2010
Visiting lecturer to MFA Glasgow School of Art
Visiting lecturer to MFA Leeds University
Uptan
2012
oil on canvas
200 x 180 cm
Blue Pavilion
2011
oil on canvas
400 x 180 cm
Red Romans
2011
oil on canvas
200 x 180 cm
Seneca
2011
oil on canvas
220 x 180 cm
Breakers
2011
oil on canvas
220 x 180 cm