Markus Liehr

Markus Liehr paints in acrylic on large canvases, concerned with illusion and reality, value and consumption, often approached through unfamiliar places. His Sotheby's series grew out of time in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where the perception of time, space and the value of money quickly blurs. Liehr paints luxury homes taken from Sotheby's International Realty listings, among them properties linked to Bugsy Siegel and Frank Sinatra, and traces the parallels between organised crime and the opaque money flows of the high-end market. The rendering is loose and impressionistic, in muted pinks, yellows and cerulean blues set against garish pastels, with patches of bare white canvas left showing. The houses appear as commodities that exist online before they exist in the flesh, and the paintings hold that tension between the virtual and the physical while staying close to the sensuous pleasure of paint.