Annabeth Marks: Extender

Painter Annabeth Marks is equally concerned with acts of construction and of deconstruction. Her work forces a consideration of the boundaries of painting in both process and form.

These ideas manifest in her three interrelated ways of working. One format is a method of creating paintings in which material is unstretched, painted, cut, and reassembled to create layered canvases. Other works take the form of collaged and double-sided loose canvases that hang over a rod as a banner. And, lastly, she often breaks down leather jackets with careful calculation, cutting them at the seams and using them as found objects that become surfaces for paintings.

By employing these methods, Marks always renders aspects of her paintings unknowable. All three forms have a relationship to windows and landscape in addition to the body, flush with ideas of interiority and exteriority, skins, layering and wrapping, porousness and protection. These ideas circle around one central question, how does a painting become an object?

She views color as a material and is highly attuned to the associations between the colors in her work. Each painting is made using highly saturated pigments as a vehicle for harnessing color’s subjective emotional currency.

For her contribution to the Return to the Real series, Marks will present new works—a group of small, dense and richly colored paintings. Reflecting on the conditions of the past year, these intimate paintings are meditations on the psychology of scale. Simultaneous with their interiority, folds and tabs draw the composition off the normative rectangle of the canvas and extend the paintings into the space of the room.

View the Gallery Handout