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LEO MOCK
IT COMES WITH A WORD OF LONELINESS
7 MAY - 1 AUGUST 2025

Lundgren Gallery is pleased to announce Leo Mock's first solo show with the gallery, entitled It Comes with a Word of Loneliness, exhibiting 17 recent paintings. Leo Mock (b. 1964, Los Angeles, CA) graduated from Art Center College of Design. His works have been exhibited at China Art Objects, M+B in Los Angeles and Anton Kern Gallery. Recent press includes The New York Times and Art Review. Mock lives and works in Mérida, Mexico.

Leo Mock is a metaphysical cartoonist, a landscape cosmicomic, a sci-fi set-painter for the unreal vistas of his own otherworldly spiritual domains. Take Agnes Pelton’s desert transcendentalism, filter them through the surrealist poetry of the Krazy Kat comics and then shake well with the pink smoke of proto-punk record covers and you get close. All of it an Emersonian appreciation of nature from another world. But the je ne sais quoi of Leo Mock’s painting still eludes, nevertheless, draw your eyes slowly over these pictures and a mood begins to mist over you.

 

The craggy rock pillars tower into a sky marked with an identical double line of clouds like a particularly somnolent glitch in the old Matrix. The preternaturally hazy blue seas sop with tranquillity. The pearlescent pink milk of the meteors streaking light is so perfectly formed as to look like a particularly comforting off-brand of Xanax bars. The perfect repetition of white caps on that serpentine green ocean almost feel like the animation from a 80s videogame, excepting they are definitely too deftly painted for such 8-bit throwbacks. These colors are both too real and unreal to be anything quite so digital. And many of these are marked with a Barnett Newman-ish zip of paint that could just as easily be the long, skinny legs and feet of a mysterious bird whose body (usually) disappears just off the picture plane.

 

Even when the skies haze with blackness like the blanketing smoke of wildfires, the slow melodic hum of these vast and vacant landscapes gives one a subtle buzz, micro-dosing mushrooms before your morning jog on Venus. Or simply and most magically, these paintings transport you to places that only Leo Mock can imagine.


Please email stefan@lundgrengallery.com for further information about the show and available works.

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"It ́s the same, it ́s a sign"

2025

Oil on linen

26 x 32 cm

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"They rewrite all the books again"

2025

Oil on linen

30 x 50 cm

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"It comes on nights of choruses"

2025

Oil on linen

122 x 183 cm

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"Keep your silence to yourself"

2025

Oil on linen

123 x 183 cm

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"How slow and slow and slow it goes"

2025

Oil on linen

70 x 100 cm

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"Of beloved Ancestors and blessed saints"

2025

Oil on linen

32 x 41 cm

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"See them talk, and see them drown"

2025

Oil on linen

28 x 27 cm

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"It comes with words of loneliness"

2025

Oil on linen

100 x 75 cm

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"A hundred unions and blessed saints"

2025

Oil on linen

33 x 51 cm

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"She Knows"

2025

Oil on linen

50 x 80 cm

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"The paper illusion"

2025

Oil on linen

45 x 69 cm

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"It ́s the same, it ́s a sign, I"

2025

Oil on linen

42 x 58 cm

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"Oceans between us"

2025

Oil on linen

50 x 32 cm

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"You get these words wrong"

2025

Oil on linen

183 x 100 cm

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"You will forget yourself"

2025

Oil on linen

100 x 80 cm

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"What you have you need"

2025

Oil on linen

121 x 92 cm

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"Pull the smiles inside"

2025

Oil on linen

100 x 75 cm

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