Hugo Markl

Hugo Markl (born December 6, 1964 in Pasadena, California) is a contemporary American artist, curator and creative director. He studied Visual communication at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (1985–90) where he graduated with an M.A. in fine arts. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, video, drawing, printmaking, installation art and performance. Markl lives in New York City.

"I imitate popular art that will not become popular art". With these words Hugo Markl has described his art, which feeds on the media imagery of consumer society, newspapers and porn websites, fashion magazines such as Vogue, logos of multinational corporations like FedEx, and even traffic signs, or objects charged with cultural and social connotations, such as the famous Winchester rifle. Markl deconstructs these symbols, or rather the relationship between the images and their referent, through collages, drawings, sculptures and installations that create a typical estrangement effect, creating a vision that looks both familiar and unknown. The artist sometimes combines references to low or vulgar culture with highbrow culture, as in the case of the IQ drawing series (2009), where the sign 'ROCK' is overlaid on the naked body of a woman, as a homage to conceptual artist Dan Graham-or the sign 'IKEA' is silhouetted against the reproduction of a famous edition of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, the Bible for critics of consumer society and mass culture.

His work was widely reviewed by major international press outlets such as Art in America or the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. In his exhibition "Peter Builts" in 1997 at Galerie Walcheturm in Zurich he explored thoroughly and precisely the different facets of audio-visual impulses and how they influence contemporary body and mind. His work was compared to Richard Serra's minimal opulence as well as to Richard Prince's aesthetics, which cross the visual signs of everyday life with the insignia of art. This intersection of everyday life, pop culture, criticism and art is the base of his continuous exploration of aesthetic experience and the meaning of artistic creation nowadays.

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