The Chris Voss Show Podcast – 100 Paintings: An Artist’s Life in New York City by Rob Mango

100 Paintings: An Artist’s Life in New York City by Rob Mango

https://www.robmango.com/100-paintings-an-artist-life-in-new-york

https://www.amazon.com/100-Paintings-Artists-Life-York/dp/0692263136

Equal parts monograph and memoir, 100 Paintings: An Artist’s Life in New York City is one man’s artistic journey from his native Chicago to a pioneering residency in Manhattan’s storied neighborhood of Tribeca. Rob Mango, as much an athlete as an artist, has explored New York City on foot since 1977–its architecture and its denizens, its streets and its harbors providing the former track star with the inspiration for much of his highly individualistic work. As noted in the foreword by art critic Robert Mahoney, ”Mango’s paintings can be seen as being produced by a man whose body was fed oxygen to a fantastical high while running through the city.”
With more than 200 full-color artworks and photographs, this book documents Mango’s journey and the body of work he has created over the past four-plus decades. From the birth of Tribeca to the horrors of 9/11 and its aftermath, Mango reveals the details as only such a singular artist can. Along the way, he rubs shoulders with Wall Street titans, the art world’s up-and-comers, punk rockers, and such celebrated downtowners as Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers and Bob Dylan. A central hub of Tribeca was the Neo Persona Gallery, which Mango founded in 1984 to represent and exhibit the work of the neighborhood’s burgeoning art scene.

Mango’s diverse body of work, depicted here, includes vividly imagined, surreal meditations on the artist in the city and abroad, animated by figures from his personal mythology. Drawings, assemblages, sculptures, paintings, and groundbreaking painted-sculptural hybrid works, from 1975 2014, represent Mango’s entire life as an artist, including stints in the Midwest, New Mexico, Paris, Prague, Venice, and Tuscany. Featured in this retrospective are a series of epic, large-scale paintings set in a fantastic New York, replete with the city’s iconic architectural landmarks, but populated by gods, warriors, shamans, and other figures drawn from many epochs and cultures. Also here are portraits of the famous and infamous, pastoral scenes from a rural Tuscan village, and Mango’s breathtaking series of nudes.

About the author
Interview originally published in Du Jour, Oct 21, 2014.

What brought you to New York City in the ’70s, and how did the city influence you and your artwork?

I quickly became aware that the center of the art universe was New York City. The fantasy of coming to [the city] and becoming part of it was launched by painters I encountered while roaming the halls of the Art Institute of Chicago as a teen–Rivers, Johns, DeKooning and Rauschenberg. My obsession with New York became so highly evolved that it sustained me long after I arrived. In many ways, the fantasy of New York exceeded the actual experience initially, which was, in a word, cruel. My Midwestern fantasy of New York sustained the creation of numerous major works, which blend realistic detail and imaginative or surreal invention, particularly “Millennium” and “Return to the City.”