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Mark Symczak
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Mark Symczak (1954-2015)
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Mark Symczak (1954–2015) was a Pittsburgh-born painter whose 40-year career was cut too short. Educated at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, his early work reflected the industrial landscapes of his youth, blending photo-realism with surrealist blur and density. After relocating to New York in 1982, his subject matter shifted toward human figures and urban life, deeply influenced by his work in theater set design in New York. Throughout the mid-1980s and 1990s, human subjects dominated the canvas. Scenes of people living in a tight metropolis were often depicted in a theater or nightclub setting. The excited energy of the stage and the warmth of collaboration can be felt in these scenes, even as his style turns toward the flat and angular line, often associated with the work of Max Beckmann. Symczak’s work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the U.S., and remains notable for its expressive use of color, evolving visual language, and the artist’s engagement with the worlds around him.
Over the course of four decades, Mark Symczak’s paintings revealed a restless evolution—so diverse in form and spirit that it is impossible to confine him to any single genre. For Symczak, the act of painting was revelatory rather than prescriptive: each image disclosed itself in the process, an uncovering rather than a construction. His work was inseparable from his environment and inner state—prolific, searching, and always in motion. Across abstraction, surrealism, impressionism, collage, photorealism, and figuration, his paintings possessed a singular purity of intent. Birds, machines, cities, and people coexisted in both real and imagined spaces, inviting viewers to look beyond subject matter to the context and consciousness that gave rise to them.
Symczak’s work resonates within broad modernist and urban traditions. His bold compositions and fractured figures evoke the psychological density of Max Beckmann, the rhythmic vitality and geometric abstraction of Stuart Davis, and the sensual, stylized bodies of Richard Lindner. His work also shares a kinship with the raw immediacy of New York street and subway graffiti art—its layered improvisations, saturated colors, and urban pulse. In this sense, Symczak captured something essential about New York itself during the 1980s and 1990s: a city of contradictions, both chaotic and alive, where human energy, artistic experimentation, and emotional candor collided.
Born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania—a town shaped by the lingering glory of the industrial era—Symczak grew up amid the textures of metal, machinery, and labor. When he entered the Art Institute of Pittsburgh in 1972, he began translating that industrial environment into a visual language of form and energy. His early works juxtaposed flatness and density, clarity and blur, realism and dream. Influenced by his father’s career as a chemist, Symczak populated his canvases with the instruments of science and industry, rendered in precise yet sensuous detail. His use of color reintroduced the human touch—reminding us that behind every machine was a maker, an operator, a pulse.
In 1982, Symczak moved with his wife to the New York City area, marking a dramatic shift in subject matter and tone. The rhythmic structures of pipes and metal transformed into teeming crowds, capturing the kinetic charge of the city. The industrial world gave way to human density—people pressed together, vibrating in confined spaces, pulsing with energy. Throughout the mid-1980s and 1990s, human figures dominated the canvas. The stage, nightclub, and street replaced the factory floor. This new environment echoed Symczak’s work as a set designer in New York theater, where ensemble and interaction became central. His compositions of clustered figures, angular forms, and flattened planes revealed affinities with Max Beckmann, whose psychological tension and compressed spaces Symczak instinctively shared. Even in abstraction, he continued to illuminate the complexities of human connection—colors and lines fragmenting yet still striving toward coherence.
By the 2000s, a new spatial freedom entered his paintings. The anti-gravity of his early industrial works resurfaced as figures and forms began to float. People now appeared isolated within their own activities, disconnected yet serene. The sharp edges of earlier decades softened into undulating curves, amorphous color fields, and geometric fragments that hovered between abstraction and dream. This shift coincided with a profound personal challenge—Symczak’s diagnosis with cancer—which ushered in a more introspective and bodily awareness. The surreal tone that once defined his compositions deepened into a spiritual one, expressed through fluid shapes and organic patterns that seem to breathe on the surface of the canvas.
A sustained subject from 2010 onward was the “Birds” series, the most contemplative body of work in his oeuvre. Created through a meditative process of inking and collage, these compositions emerged as the artist “waited for the birds to reveal themselves.” Long a recurring motif in his art—perhaps inspired by his mother’s devotion to ornithology—birds became emblems of transcendence and continuity. In these late works, Symczak achieved a serene synthesis of intuition and structure, energy and stillness. He continued painting and collaging until his death on June 19, 2015. His canvases remain radiant with color, humor, and a profound love of life.
We would like to thank Mark’s wife, Susan, for bringing his amazing story and work to Lost Art Salon.View All _|_ View Available _|_ View Sold
