DECONSTRUCTING MARILYN | MARK LANCASTER AT THE REDFERN GALLERY
Mark Lancaster, Marilyn 22 Oct '87, 1987, Oil on canvas, 30.5 x 25.5cm, courtesy of The Redfern Gallery1964 was an eventful year for the Yorkshire artist Mark Lancaster. He was studying fine art, under pop-art guru Richard Hamilton, at King’s College, Newcastle. In his summer break, he went to New York, where he wangled a job assisting Andy Warhol in the first incarnation of The Factory, on East 87th Street. How? Here’s a lesson: he found his number in the phone book, and rang him up.
There he met – namedrop alert – the likes of Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Larry Rivers, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler and Norman Mailer. He must have had plenty to talk about when he went back to Newcastle for his autumn term (his fellow students included Bryan Ferry).
Lancaster produced a body of work – photographs, collages and paintings – based on that New York trip, much of which was exhibited in his first solo show, at the Rowan Gallery, London, in 1965. He moved back to the States in 1973, and went on to have a successful art career there, hopping between pop art and abstraction, and as a set designer, largely for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He also found time to act as Jasper Johns’ personal assistant, and – while back in England - to strike up an unlikely friendship with Duncan Grant, which led to a series of eight paintings of Vanessa Bell, painted in 1980 and based on a 1918 Grant portrait.
Lancaster returned to England briefly in the mid-eighties, and was staying in Kent when Andy Warhol died, in February 1987. As an homage to the great American artist, he produced a series of works based on Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych, a massive project which ran to 180 works, completed in a year. The oil-on-canvas paintings were all of the same dimensions (30.5 x 20.5cms), and all featured the iconic actress in the same pose (originally a publicity shot for the film Niagara). But the image was deconstructed and rearranged in different ways, and motifs inspired by Cézanne, Matisse and Picabia were inserted, as well as profiles of Lancaster and Warhol. These paintings were exhibited at the Major Rowan Gallery in London just after the first anniversary of Warhol’s death; the show was called Post-Warhol Souvenirs.
Lancaster became an American citizen in 1999, living out his days in Miami, Florida, where he died in 2021. From April 5, The Redfern Gallery are putting on the show, Mark Lancaster: Thinking and Feeling, 1960-1990, featuring works from this highly productive period of his career, including several from the Marilyn series.