Exhibitions

Fahrenheit Madrid has the pleasure of presenting the first European solo exhibition of paintings by New York artist Annabeth Marks. This exhibition brings together a group of works that encapsulate the artists’ expansive painting practice. Working between and across three distinct formats; small and large stretched paintings, a canvas banner, and a painted leather jacket, there is a constant negotiation of color, form, and material presence that builds between the works and across the room.

In this new body of work, color mediates the painterly relationships between framing, patterning, and abstract notions of landscape and the elements. This comes from a desire to blur and call attention to perceived boundaries between what is interior and what is exterior. In these paintings, the artist utilizes highly saturated color for its ability to modulate time, affect emotional states and perception. Annabeth writes: “Color is visceral matter. Color is highly specific and immediate, while also remaining slippery, subjective, and boundaryless.”

Central to these works is the process of their construction. In the stretched works and the banner, fragments of material are painted, cut, reassembled and painted over. Layers of color and texture are employed to heighten tension between pictorial space or depth and the materiality of paint and canvas. The canvas banner is a way of conceiving of a painting that contains an interior space and that hangs from a rod like a garment. In all of these works production is subject to continual creation and revision, working through the unknown until arriving at an understanding of what the object wants to be. The patchwork collaging in Annabeth’s work, juxtaposing cells of color, bounded yet unconstrained, evokes the relationship between the part and whole, droplet and wave.

With the singular jacket piece in the exhibition, the relationships between exteriority and interiority that happen across the other works, is located here within the body. A garment that forms a second skin, the previously worn and painted jacket speaks to all the ways that bodies are contained. The jacket is a location for coverage, protection, necessity, and desire.

This exhibition encompasses work made both before and during the pandemic. Spanning this time of an abrupt global shift in the way that we move through the world and affect one another, these paintings provide an opportunity to contemplate these shifting relationships between flatness and gesture, movement and stillness.

Annabeth Markslives and works in New York and holds an MFA from Bard College. She has been the recipient of several awards, fellowships, and residencies including, The Florence Leif Grant for Female Painters, Providence; and The Lighthouse Works Residency and Fellowship. Most recently Mark’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Artist Curated Projects, LA and White Columns, NY. Notable group exhibitions include Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Babayaga Gallery, Hudson; Magenta Plains, NY; Derek Ellery Gallery, NY; Canada Gallery, NY; Rachel Uffner Gallery, NY. Her work has also been part of museum and institutional exhibitions including Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; MoM/a PS1, Long Island City; Woodmere Museum of Art, Philadelphia; and, Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence. She has an upcoming exhibition at the Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan in 2021.