Mark Kelner’s art responds to the world around us. Not in the typical way that painters might interpret people or nature, but instead as commentary on America’s consumer culture—from strip-mall signs along the roadway to the value of art itself.

Guiding a visitor through his spacious studio in Mt. Rainier, Maryland, Kelner reflects on the inspiration for his latest series, Barcodes. “My experience with the dissemination of mainstream art news is: ‘This is the $450 million DaVinci. This is the $195 million Warhol.’ That is a complete perversion of what art is supposed to be,” he says, “how it has become so objectified, so commodified.”

Barcodes’ haunting images outline the contours of multi-million-dollar paintings: “Francis Bacon, Basquiat, Boticelli,” Kelner ticks off, as he pulls his versions, arranged alphabetically, from cabinet drawers. Onto a heavily textured surface of white acrylic paint, the artist superimposes black lines; each line is tailored to suit the form of the original painting.

As part of the series, Kelner assembled a catalogue identifying the before (auction data) and after (Barcodes) for 40 paintings; it lists sale dates, prices and buyers’ names. “Because,” the artist explains, “I really want to get to the root of who a $450 million painting is for. Why does it cost $450 million? And will it ever be seen in public again?”

Kelner considers his work to be conceptual art, where the idea behind each piece is as important as the art itself. While humor initially attracts audiences to his work, its meaning runs deeper. Contemplating a room filled with his paintings, Kelner suggests, “can get real dark, real fast.”

The artist’s outlook derives in part from his Soviet heritage. Born in Cleveland, he is the child of immigrants who arrived in Ohio from Moscow in 1974. When Kelner was two, his father, a celebrated Russian writer and his mother, a physician, moved the family to Rockville—a suburban merchandising mecca that would eventually surface in the artist’s work.

After graduating from George Mason University as an English major, he found a job at an art gallery in Reston. His first exhibit brought together works by Soviet artists, all of whom Kelner knew. On his way to becoming an artist, he spent two years learning printmaking at Dennis O’Neil’s Handprint Workshop International in Alexandria. Barcodes grew out of that experience. “It’s the idea of painting with screens that comes from a printmaker’s instincts,” he says.

In 2024, American University Museum displayed Kelner’s previous series, New American Landscapes. Based on real places—from Langley Park, Maryland, to Las Vegas—the 36 strip-mall paintings represent composites, or as the artist puts it, “greatest hits.” Starting with photos, he meticulously rendered sections of the signage using carefully leveled masking tape, searched online for fonts that reproduced actual typefaces, and digitally sized letters before stenciling them on, line by line. Minor imperfections alert viewers to the handmade quality of these roughly five-by-four-foot paintings, which took four years to complete.

“Traditionally we talk about the sun, water, trees as being of the natural world,” Kelner explains. “But when I started photographing strip-mall signs, I recognized this as my version of nature.” By isolating these attention-grabbers from cars, buildings and trees, he created paintings that, the artist notes, “by their very isolation become something else. That’s interesting to me.”

Kelner traces a major influence on his art to 1980s material culture, an era when possessions were equated with status. He also credits Soviet artists, especially the duo Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, whose amusing and mordant art simultaneously ridicules Soviet and American cultures. Reaching back earlier in the 20th century, Kelner studied the pioneering work of Soviet artists Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky, and turned examples of their abstract art into letters, including on a wall relief that forms the Levi’s logo.

Beginning in 2016, the artist also launched a series of paintings called Text Without Words. Among that group, Eight American Reds presents titan brands in a lineup of red panels—specifically MAGA, Marlboro, Coca Cola, Levi’s, McDonald’s, Campbell’s, Ford Mustang and Heinz ketchup. “It became a real exploration of symbols of national identity, which is where I’m at right now,” Kelner observes. “Young people today are getting only how much things cost,” he continues. “Nuance is over. That’s really a shame, because I operate in nuance. And I want to see where this art can go.”

For more information, visit markkelner.com.