In Conversation
Mark Dagley is an artist who has exhibited his paintings and sculptures, which explore the intersection of abstraction and materiality, in New York and Europe since the 1980s. Lauri Bortz is a playwright and author whose farcical tragedies have been performed in theaters in New York, and over the past decade, she has created a series of children’s books. Abaton Project Room, or APR, is a temporary exhibition space conceived by Lauri, located at 11 Broadway, in the historic Bowling Green Office Building in Lower Manhattan. Over a one-year period (August 2024-2025), APR is alternating monthly presentations of Mark Dagley’s work—paintings, sculpture, and works on paper—with thematic group exhibitions as well as selections from Mark and Lauri’s personal collection.
How does the current exhibition relate to the entire project?
Off White is part four of a five-part series, ranging from my early days in NYC to the present. After my 1987 solo exhibition at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, I went to Europe and ended up staying several years. A show had been scheduled at Galerie Hans Strelow in Düsseldorf, so I rented a studio in nearby Cologne. While I was there, additional exhibitions were arranged in Spain, Italy and Switzerland. For each of these, I’d travel to that country and work in a temporary studio or cheap hotel room. Many of the pieces I made abroad entered collections immediately, but those that didn’t had to be left behind, in gallery storage. I recovered a lot of it recently; shipped some home in bulk, bought some back at auction. Once I had the work again, I was I was excited to show it in NYC in a comprehensive way.
How have you organized the exhibitions that are focused on your collection?
We’ve based those shows on pieces we consider core to our collection: the Steven Parrino metal relief in the debut exhibition was paired with an unusual print edition by Don Voisine and complemented by a Joe Zucker print Behind the Desk, a nook set aside to feature work from the collection.
An early Cindy Sherman edition inspired Wavelength. The exhibition was comprised of one photo, one sculpture, one painting and featured Melissa Staiger and Chaconne Klaverenga. Behind the Desk had a different painting by Nora Griffin every weekend. We’ve been collecting her work for almost 20 years, ever since her solo exhibition at Abaton Garage, the gallery we ran out of our garage in Jersey City from 2003-2008.
We centered Darker Days, our early winter exhibition, around a couple of works on paper and an altered X-ray that were gifts from our friend Cora Cohen, pieces she’d exhibited at Abaton Garage in the early 2000s. We invited a couple other friends to participate in Darker Days and chose work that highlighted Cohen’s: a skull painting from Ken Weathersby’s extensive series and Judith Fleishman’s Velvet Barricade sculpture. We also borrowed a small work on paper by Vivian Springford from the archive, something that echoed the two similarly sized Cohens. Vincent Como lent us a print installation that fit perfectly Behind the Desk. In addition, we featured a different piece from the collection every weekend. Among them were works by Michael Steiner and Dorothy Dehner.
A memorable exhibition dealt with very personal imagery. Could you talk about the work?
Conspiracy, Abduction, Hysteria, which opened on the Ides of March, was comprised almost entirely of work we owned, except for a work by Toby Kilpatrick, which we borrowed from the artist. The exhibition included an early George Condo assemblage, a 1950s Budd Hopkins abstraction, a watercolor by sci-fi illustrator Jack Gaughan (the first piece Lauri ever acquired) and works by underground avant-pop artists Sarada Holt, Diamanda Galás and Marianne Nowottny. Behind the Desk we showed a couple of 1990s paintings by Paul Reed, a member of the Washington D.C. Color School, and a very early work by Ruth Ann Fredenthal.
During my first few exhibitions we chose pieces that reflected and/or enhanced the work, such as the Barnett Newman/Frank O’Hara “In Memory of my Feelings” edition, published by MOMA in 1967; a selection of small works by the almost forgotten Jacob Rabinowitz and a tiny Salvo painting. More recently we’ve focused on contemporary artists I’m in dialog with, like Gwenael Kerlidou and yourself.
You are in the eighth month of this year-long project. How has this experience changed how you look at your work?
Cycling through half a century of my own work has been very rewarding. I hadn’t seen the paintings in Embellishments and Interventions (which were never shown previously) since I created them, in the early 80s. The paintings from the other two shows had been in storage for decades and the sculpture was wrapped up as soon as the base was completed. It’s been particularly satisfying to view the work in a beautifully lit, controlled environment, where I’ve been able to spend time thinking about them again.
I still have a large inventory of works from 1995 on that haven’t been seen in the United States. This includes most of my shaped monochromes and large constructions. Minus Space showed a few of them in 2012 and Spencer Brownstone did a larger exhibition in 2017. Additionally, David Richard Gallery presented a good overview of my neo-optical paintings, works on paper and sculpture from the late 90s through 2019.
How does this project room relate to the Abaton Garage, the catalogues that you have published, and the music CDs that you have produced?
Abaton Project Room is a continuation of what we started with Abaton Garage, where we showed Steven Parrino, Bill Schwarz, Nora Griffin, Cora Cohen, Tom Warren, Alix Lambert, Don Voisine, Stephanie Campos, and many more. For every exhibition, we published a brochure with images and text. We wanted the artists to have promotional material, and we wanted historic documentation for ourselves. After the conclusion of the Abaton Project Room, we’ll be publishing a book reviewing all the exhibitions, with installation shots and texts from some of the artists. APR is a side project to Abaton Book Company, which we founded in 1997. We began with the publication of Lauri Bortz’s early dramatic works and went on to release many other limited edition artist books and some of my exhibition catalogs. We’ve also produced dozens of music projects by artists across the globe.
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Mark Dagley: off white, Paintings from Düsseldorf & Genova, 1989-1991, Behind the Desk: John Mendelsohn Small White Color Wheel Paintings,
April 19-May 18, Abaton Project Room, 11 Broadway, New York #965,
An appointment is required. abatonprojectroom@protonmail.co @abatonprojectroom
About the Artist: Mark Dagley studied painting at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C, and video and electronic music at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He holds a Core Musical Skills certificate from The Juilliard School’s Evening Division. Dagley has worked with a number of influential galleries worldwide, including Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York; Galerie Hans Strelow, Dusseldorf; Galeria Mar Estrada, Madrid; and Galerie Swart, Amsterdam. www.markdagley.com IG: @markdagleystudio
About the writer: John Mendelsohn’s abstract paintings explore the poetics of color, perception, and light. Over the past five decades, his work has been exhibited in New York and beyond, and reviewed in publications including The New York Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic, and The New Criterion. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at the David Richard Gallery, New York, and Breath, curated by John Yau, at Art Cake, Brooklyn. He received a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from Rutgers University, and participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He has written about contemporary art for many publications. www.johnmendelsohn123.com. IG: @johnmendelsohn123