(photo credit; Raphael Soltero)
Mark Soltero is an artist living and working in Ōtautahi, Christchurch, New Zealand.
Using a combination of reflective metallics and dense light-absorbing blacks, paint is applied with squeegees or large brushes. Images evolve from camouflage patterns or typographic forms, referencing the urban environment, while others are the result of mining the interiors of particular architectural spaces, slicing through layers of light and shadow, revealing fragmentary patterns. While individual marks may be visible on close viewing, the image is read as a single mark.
Mark’s work presents a pictorial space that provides a stimulus for audiences to make associations with their own visual memories and experiences. These are history paintings examining relationships between image, memory and materiality in relation to key concepts; Benjamin’s ideas around fragments and Derrida’s concept of différance, in time.
Mark holds an MFA – Dunedin School of Art, a B.Design–Ara Institute of Canterbury and PGDipTchg, Art & Art History–NZGSE. Mark was a founding member of the Art Associates Aotearoa collective and exhibited with them from 2018–2025. He was awarded the inaugural Head of School Award for Excellence in Post-Graduate Drawing from the Dunedin School of Art in 2014. He has been a finalist in the National Contemporary Art Awards three times, twice a finalist in the Adam Portraiture Award, a finalist in the Academy Art Prize, the NZ Painting & Printmaking Award, the 5th International Open Print Show and the American Drawing Biennial IV. Mark completed the Foyer Wall Commission for the Ashburton Art Gallery in 2021 and has exhibited at the Centre of Contemporary Art (2009, 2018-2019), ArtsPost Waikato Museum (2011), Chambers Art Gallery (2019, 2021, 2023), McAtamney Gallery (2024, 2025) and Ashburton Art Gallery (2021).
Mark is represented by;
LeStrange Art Gallery
372a Ferry Road, Christchurch
McAtamney Gallery
40a Talbot Street, Geraldine
Chambers Art Gallery
80 Durham Street South, Christchurch