We are set to receive a new group of work from New Mexico-based painter Mark Horst. One of the paintings is of a girl reaching out towards a chicken, beckoning her. I inquired with the artist about the meaning of the painting, and learned that Horst used the artwork as the model for a mural he painted this summer in Albuquerque.

The mural is 25′ x 100′ and all painted in acrylics. The project was called the “Monte Vista Mural Project,” and was funded by the Albuquerque, NM City Arts Board and a local construction company (the painting sits on the side of their building). The title of the work is “Reach.” Horst said about the meaning behind the painting and subsequent mural, “I had this idea that the girl was reaching from the human world into the chicken world, or the natural world. It is sort of a metaphor for Albuquerque’s connections to farming and animals.”

See the transition from blank wall to completed mural, below, and view Mark Horst’s paintings on our website, here.

About his work, Horst conveys this message: I paint as a way to see and to know the world. Yet the world is never finished and the joy of seeing it is never complete—and so my painting points to the fleeting, the glimpsed, to the life that is always present and so difficult to touch.

I paint the way I see—which is always incomplete and in process. The more I look, the more there is to observe. The world opens up and flowers; the mud takes form.

I paint the figure as an invitation to explore the world and ourselves—our light, our shadows, our incompleteness. I’m trying to create a space for us to inhabit and give us time with questions that are not meant to be answered.

Tags: Albequerque mural, Mark Horst, Mark Horst Mural
Posted in Gallery News