ART CITIES: London-Helen Marten

Helen Marten in 2016 she was awarded the Tate Turner Prize. Marten works across sculpture, painting, video and writing to create a body of work that questions the stability of the material world and our place within it. Alluding to ideas, systems and experiences, her work across all media sets out to articulate complex ideas about the way in which we exist in and understand the world around us.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Sadie Coles HQ Gallery

In “Treatise of a Coat”, Helen Marten continues her exploration of material language and symbolic architecture with a series of new wall-based works that challenge both the grammar of painting and the syntax of thought. Exhibited as six interconnected objects, the show becomes a spatial treatise in itself — a kind of visual essay on the possibilities of layering, containment, and metamorphosis. Each work operates as a dense palimpsest: a drawing within a painting, an image within a box, a coat within another coat. At its core, “Treatise of a Coat” is a meditation on the act of covering and uncovering — the physical, linguistic, and psychological gestures implied by the word coat. Marten stretches the term to its etymological and conceptual limits: the coat as garment, as animal fur, as layer of paint, as skin, shell, rind, or varnish. To coat is to conceal and to reveal simultaneously — to build up surfaces while hinting at what lies beneath. It is both a protective gesture and a sensual one, an act of control and of excess. In this way, the exhibition becomes a study of transformation through accumulation — each surface a record of desire, shame, curiosity, and care. The title’s playful allusion to Honoré de Balzac’s “Treatise on Modern Stimulants” further underlines Marten’s intellectual wit. Her “Treatise” is neither formal nor systematic; it shrugs at order, preferring instead the etymological pleasures of the word treat: to negotiate, to handle, to drag about. In Marten’s hands, the act of treating becomes a physical manipulation of image and matter — a tactile negotiation between thought and surface. At the centre of these works are Marten’s intricate drawings, populated by humans and animals — entwined figures of care and destruction, dependency and transformation. The animal, that ancient cipher, becomes both mirror and medium: parent, child, lover, phantom. In Marten’s universe, the animal embodies our shared anxieties and fantasies, the porous threshold between tenderness and exploitation. Rendered with obsessive precision, these creatures oscillate between cartoonish familiarity and mythic abstraction, serving as stand-ins for language itself — endlessly expressive, never exhausted. Each drawing is housed within a box-like frame, a shell that both contains and exposes. These frames — cast in aluminium greys, scratched, drawn upon — are not passive enclosures but active participants in the visual field. They become metaphors for containment and vulnerability, echoing the tension between abstraction and figuration, order and entropy. The nested structure — drawing within painting, painting within frame — evokes a sense of gestation, as if each image were incubating its own meanings, vibrating with a concentrated energy at its core. Materially, Marten’s works oscillate between sheen and matte, between friction and flow. The surfaces shift under the eye: colors collide awkwardly, shapes press too closely together, and forms melt or harden in unpredictable ways. Eyes, holes, glyphs, and drips proliferate — a cacophony of visual syntax that resists closure. Within this sensory density lies a peculiar balance of precision and chaos, of the deliberate and the intuitive. Ghost, rock, hair, twin, flower, snail, wax, bone, tile, skin — Marten’s vocabulary of materials and metaphors reads like a taxonomy of transformation, each element on the verge of dissolving into another. The result is an environment that feels alive and unstable, a living system of visual thought.In “Treatise of a Coat”, Marten invites us to consider how images behave — how they build, coat, and uncoat meaning. The exhibition becomes a study in the poetics of surface, where every mark is both wound and ornament, every image a shell for another. To look closely at these works is to participate in a continual act of negotiation: between the abstract and the bodily, the animal and the human, the seen and the hidden. Ultimately, Marten’s “treatise” is not a manual but a meditation — a lyrical, disobedient exploration of how we construct and protect meaning through the things we make and the skins we shed.

Photo: Helen Marten, Men, 2025, nylon paint on fabric, coloured pencil on paper, hand-drawn sand cast aluminium, Douglas Fir, stained Ash, aluminium, hardware 169.8 x 145.8 x 21.1 cm / 66 ⅞ x 57 ⅜ x 8 ¼ in, © Helen Marten, Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ Gallery

Info; Sadie Coles HQ Gallery, 8 Bury Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 7/10-15/11/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.sadiecoles.com/