Mario Garcia

Mario Garcia (b. 1927-?) was a sculptor and painter active in the New York area whose work belongs to the second generation of American Abstract Expressionist artists. Born in 1927, Garcia pursued his formal training in Europe, attending the École des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland from 1945 to 1949. This rigorous European foundation gave him the technical grounding that would inform his later practice, and it also placed him within the broader postwar transatlantic exchange that shaped so much of American art in the years following the Second World War.

From 1950 to 1959, Garcia lived in a red barn in the Hamptons on Long Island that belonged to Barney Rosset, the publisher and husband of the painter Joan Mitchell. Through this close proximity, Garcia became intimately acquainted with Abstract Expressionism through Mitchell and her circle, and he was drawn directly into what has come to be called the "second generation" or "second wave" of Abstract Expressionist artists. Alongside figures such as Grace Hartigan, Michael Goldberg, and Alfred Leslie, this generation built on the achievements of the first-generation masters, above all Willem de Kooning, and translated the ambitions of gestural abstraction into a wide range of personal and inventive directions. The Long Island community that gathered around Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and other painters offered Garcia both artistic dialogue and the freedom of a working environment removed from the pressures of the New York gallery scene.

Precious little else is known about the life of Mario Garcia. His paintings and sculptures survive today as important reminders of the second Abstract Expressionist generation, produced by an artist whose direct engagement with Mitchell and her circle placed him at the heart of one of the most significant moments in twentieth-century American art.