Mark Licari

Mark Licari’s manic, exuberant drawings and sculptures are extraordinarily detailed—working in the tradition of artists like Julie Mehretu and Ralph Steadman, Licari’s imagery is gorgeous in its excess. His outrageous worlds show instances wherein business suits appear disintegrating and bursting with soil and flowers. In other whimsical situations, a colossal squid is depicted in a bathtub or a medicine cabinet is stuffed with handcrafted cockroaches, pills, condoms, and glue bottles. Charming in their jokey, domestic joyfulness, Licari’s artworks nonetheless point to serious themes of decay, entropy, and the clash of man and nature.

Licari was a 2003 recipient of the California Community Foundation Emerging Visual Arts Fellowship. His work can be found at the Gemeente Museum in The Hague, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Monterey Museum of Art in Monterey, California, among others. Licari has been the subject of several major solo shows since 2000, and he was included in both the Moscow Biennale and the Biennale of Sydney, among numerous other important group exhibitions.