Marcos Sánchez

LSS NYC

“Down the Drain”

2023 November 10 to December 10

Long Story Short is pleased to present Down The Drain, a solo exhibition featuring paintings by Santiago-based artist Marcos Sánchez. Curated by Rebecca Polanzke, the exhibition marks Sánchez’s New York debut and opens November 10, 2023 at 52 Henry St, New York, NY.

Down The Drain refers to Sánchez’s depictions of expansive worlds that have been partially washed away. Incorporating visual codes and iconography from a variety of genres and styles, the artist’s paintings of corroding dreamscapes and scrambled imagery feature bright colors and varying textures.The fragmented nature of the works is offset through harmonious compositions that balance chaos with color and space.

In the artist’s playful and improvisational paintings, Sánchez composes “collages” by positioning macabre subjects against Boschian backdrops. Anthropomorphic animals, disembodied appendages, and conjoined bodies reminiscent of children's illustrations or science fiction are "collaged" with contrasting exteriors. Detached from their individual contexts, each character becomes a stranger in a strange land.

The isolating settings in Sánchez’s work serve as allegories for intangible loss and, subsequently, recovering or recontextualizing what remains. Figures and landscapes removed from their original contexts emphasize feelings of alienation as they blindly confront their new worlds. Disturbing characters are now reimagined in surroundings that portray their unsettling features in a humorous manner.

Many of Sánchez’s paintings incorporate troubled landscapes with aspects of pollution, floods, fire, and extreme weather alluding to climate change. His approach to this disruptive inevitability adds an underlying quality of realism that allows the works to feel fantastical yet tethered to the here and now.

Marcos Sánchez (b. 1980, Chile) is a visual artist based in Santiago, Chile. He received his BFA from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago and an MFA from New York University. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Pabellón 4 Gallery in Buenos Aires, and Field Projects in New York. As an animator, he has directed music videos for artists like The Breeders and collaborated with musicians like John Dieterich (Deerhoof) and Claire Cronin. His audiovisual work has won awards at SXSW and the Japan Media Arts Festival.