Annabeth Marks' (b. 1986 in Rochester, NY, lives and works in NYC and VT) highly inventive paintings are composed of cut and brightly painted canvas, organized into complex, intuitive arrangements that visualize the process of their construction. Woven, folded, and intricately layered hand-painted canvas panels are wrapped around, draped over, and bound to the stretched canvas, creating dimensional surfaces that often extend beyond the pictorial frame. Using psychically charged color, Marks builds her paintings layer-by-layer, informed by her interest in how garments function as a second skin for the body. Executed over long stretches of time, Marks’ multi-step process undergoes a constant push and pull of revision, disassembling and reconstruction, until the right balance is achieved. As Dan Adler notes, “Meticulously made with hand-mixed pigments and a devotion to detail, each is an intricate investigation of color and pattern. Often resistant to photographic documentation, they bear many signs of a labor-intensive struggle to locate that perfect compositional cocktail. While rooted in modernist soil, Marks’ collage-based aesthetic eschews pretty historical pastiche for something stranger, richer.” [1]
Marks' debut institutional solo exhibition took place at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI (2021). Recent solo exhibitions include those held at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles (2024), Canada, NY (2022), Franz Kaka, Toronto, Ontario (2022), Fahrenheit Madrid Gallery, Spain (2020), and White Columns, NY (2017).
[1] Dan Adler, “Reviews: Annabeth Marks at Franz Kaka.” Artforum (May 2022), accessed online.
