Picasso and Braque, 1992
oil on canvas
80 x 108 in.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Tansey's picture «Picasso and Braque, 1992, features the title characters, who modestly refer to each other as Orville and Wilbur Wright, trying to launch an airplane modeled after an early Picasso collage.» ~ Ralph Rugoff, ArtForum, 1993.

«Picasso and Braque reimagined as Orville and Wilbur Wright struggling to get their newfangled Cubism to fly.» ~ Eleanor Heartney, Tansey at Larry Gagosian Gallery, Art in America, 2005.

Achilles and the tortoise, 1986
oil on canvas
281.9 x 193 cm.

Action Painting II, 1984
oil on canvas
193 x 279.4 cm.

«The notion of a crossroads or an intersection of visible and invisible trajectories offered the most vital metaphor for a picture. It accommodates the fact that pictorial content is mostly invisible (that is, embodied in preconceptions that are conceptual, cultural, temporal, etc.). There is really very little that is visible in the format of a picture. The value of thinking in terms of a crossroads or pictorial intersection is that if not all that much is visible, then what little there is ought to involve vital trajectories and points of collision and encounter between a variety of cultural, formal, or figural systems.» ~ Mark Tansey.

source: artchive.com, artnet.com