Mark McGreevy: Flop Sweat

This exhibition brings together a major new body of work by the Belfast based painter Mark McGreevy. McGreevy’s practice has long been celebrated for offering possible windows into other imaginary worlds and distorted realities, creating visual conundrums that imply quizzical and intimate overviews of imagery and speculative spaces. Flop Sweat, the title of this exhibition of new work, refers to the sudden, heavy perspiration caused by embarrassment, especially by the fear of failing. 

Flop Sweat is built on McGreevy’s collected archive of personal and found imagery drawn from the media and everyday experiences. These new paintings play with the unquestioned assumptions of taste, usually landscapes that seemed to have been created by the same innocuous actions and activities that appear in his painted realities. His paintings resolve at the point of the overripe often after revisiting and reworking the same canvas over an extended period. McGreevy’s paintings are purposefully wonky and embedded in the anxiety of the material and the interior world. Depicted in his paintings, spaces of seemingly little value and out of place mass, middens, declivities, dumping sites, and weird islands reveal objects that no longer hold their original meaning, creating a jittery unease.

Image Credit: Mark McGreevy, Bust Rucket, Oil on canvas. Courtesy the Artist.