Mark Beard | Bruce Sargeant (1898-1938): Sports and Leisure

July 22 – September 10, 2022 [EXTENDED]

Artist’s reception:
Wednesday, July 27, 2022
6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

ClampArt is pleased to announce “Bruce Sargeant (1898-1938): Sports and Leisure—Paintings by Mark Beard.”

In 2004, scholar Gary Haller, writing about Bruce Sargeant (now commonly known as artist Mark Beard’s most popular alter ego), observed: “Bruce Sargeant is a mythic figure in the modern art movement. He embodies a world that is in many ways lost to us; he exudes a sensibility that fills every corner of his canvas; the heaviness of his figures hides an elusive levity. . . In the stock-still gaze of his athletes, in the subdued intensity of his still lifes, in the reflective sheen on his three-dimensional work, it is clear that he goes beyond reality. . . If you look closely in the eyes of his subjects, they seem beyond the world of the viewer. They simply cannot exist—nor can the artist who created them. Sargeant is at the height of his powers when he achieves this superficiality—in the pure sense of what lies on surfaces—an analogue for the sublime.”

This new exhibition gathers murals and smaller scale works with a variety of subjects from Beard’s classic rowers and other athletes; hunters and bathers and other men enjoying the great outdoors; to much lesser seen still life compositions. It is an extensive show not only in terms of the number of canvases on display, but also the range of sizes and styles.

Mark Beard (1956-) was born and raised in Salt Lake City. His portraits, nudes, bronzes, and handcrafted books have been exhibited worldwide, and he has also designed more than twenty theatrical sets in New York, London, and Germany. His works are in numerous museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; and the Princeton, Harvard, and Yale University Museums, among many others.