Mark Ostapchuk
Genesee Road, 2011
Oil on canvas

MAEP: Standards–Mark Ostapchuk, and 90º South–Chris Willcox

Friday, January 20, 2012—Sunday, April 1, 2012
MAEP Galleries
Free Exhibition

Chris Willcox, who teaches painting at Macalester College in St. Paul, first became interested in the history of Antarctica after reading about the Antarctic Treaty of 1961, in which the continent was set aside as a scientific preserve. Working with the documentary photographs from early expeditions, Willcox creates painterly pastiches that capture the beautifully bleak Arctic landscape. She also makes psychological group portraits of these Heroic Age explorers.

Ostapchuk, an adjunct lecturer at the University of Minnesota, has been making large, abstract oil paintings for many years. He combines a frenetic color palette with controlled compositions, thin glazes with textured and burnished layers of paint. Ostapchuk calls this new suite of paintings "standards," in order to link his project as a painter to his knowledge of music, especially jazz. The paintings repeat tones and add improvisational flourishes.

Ostapchuk and Willcox have exhibited extensively throughout Minnesota, nationally, and internationally.