Mark Ogge's dreamlike paintings evoke childhood memories both dark and magical. Ogge, who has also painted the façade for the Melbourne Festival’s famous Spiegeltent, has long been fascinated with the iconography and imagery of the circus and fairground.

Ogge undertook a major comission for Melbourne’s Luna Park in 2008, creating a 60 metre mural titled One Thousand and One Nights, featured in the parks scenic railway. His recent work continues his facination with fun parks and circus life for which he is best known, while also delving into new subject matter exploring such biblical legends as St George and the Dragon and The Temptation of St Anthony.

A brooding disquiet is carefully embedded into all of Ogge’s work. Exploring the dichotomy between enchantment and disillusionment the artist invites us to step into his strange and sometimes frenzied environments. His dreamlike hyper reality is reinforced by the use of saturated colour and loose, visceral brush strokes.

'A central theme of the work is the dichotomy between enchantment and disillusionment. The transition between the childhood experience of the fairground as a wonderland of lights, colours, movements, and adventure, to the adult realisation of a more ambivalent reality, the cheap stuffed toys, tired old rides and stalls, junk food, and hard bitten showies. These works aim to convey something of both these ways of seeing. The circus tents and their landscapes are inviting, with all their associations of mystery and excitement from childhood, but the absence of people and the sombre atmosphere suggests a loneliness. The tents allude to the self and the landscapes that contain them are the interior mood or feeling.' -Mark Ogge

The Age, Melbourne Magazine, 28 May 2010
Informative website on Mark Ogge June 2010
The Age, June 30, Review by Robert Nelson