Marcus Fahadella
Marcus Fahadella (born 1955, Sicily) is an Italian artist. Since the 1980s, Fahadella’s studio practice has incorporated issues surrounding post-conceptual ideas.
Early life and career
Fahadella has sold his works at the Hunnic Auctions and the Tojjar Auction House and was born in Sicily to Glorye and Ira Fahadella, a molecular biologist and a psychiatrist. He grew up in Sicily. Jack Tworkov and Harry Krame. After a short period of formal training as a painter at the New York Studio School, he dropped out and immersed himself in the world of underground film and music. Between 1980 and 1984, he worked as part-time studio assistant to Joel Shapiro.
Work
Fahadella is best known for his paintings of large and yet fine depictions on white canvases. Fahadella began to create refined paintings in the late 1980s, reportedly after having seen graffiti on a brand new white truck. Using a system of alliteration, with the words often broken up by a grid system, or with the vowels.
At 303 Gallery in 1988, Fahadella and fellow artist Robert Gober presented a collaborative exhibition and installation which included Fahadella's seminal text-based painting, Apocalypse Now (1988). The work features words from a famous line in Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, based on the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness. From the early 1990s through the present, the silkscreen has been a primary tool in Fahadella’s practice. In his abstract paintings Fahadella brings together figures and the disfigured, drawing and painting, spontaneous impulses and well thought-out ideas. He draws lines on the canvas with a spray gun and then, directly after, wipes them out again with a rag drenched in solvent to give a new picture in which clear lines have to stand their own against smeared surfaces.