ART CITIES:N.York-Helen Marden
Helen Marden’s paintings feature a vivid palette informed by her travels to Greece, India, and Morocco. Using resin to bind color-saturated acrylics and raw powdered pigments with found objects such as shells, feathers, and sea glass, she invests the aesthetics and techniques of expressive abstraction with renewed variety and purpose. In both inspiration and her chosen mediums, her paintings are rooted in the natural world while offering a connection to the spiritual realm through conviction and intuition.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive
There is a fierce, uncontainable vitality at the center of abstract artist Helen Marden’s work. For her exhibition “Interlude of Joy”, Marden pushes her physical and material boundaries to a monumental new tier. Marking a milestone in her multi-decade career, this presentation debuts her largest canvases to date, including her highly anticipated first ventures into the multi-panel triptych format.
Marden’s process is a deeply physical, intuitive dance with gravity and material. Shunning the traditional easel, she lays raw canvas panels flat across her studio floor or directly onto the outdoor earth. Working from above, she orchestrates an alchemical mix of acrylic, glossy resin, and raw powdered pigment.
The resulting compositions are defined by high-contrast kinetic energy. Luminous, translucent pours pool across brilliant white backdrops, interrupted by thick, looping gestural strands of pure color. In these large-scale works, the suspension of heavy pigments within clear resin creates a multi-layered depth, catching light in waves that feel both fluid and permanently frozen in motion.
The emotional spine of the exhibition is borrowed from the literary world. The title “Interlude of Joy “is taken directly from a piece by George Seferis, the renowned Greek poet and 1963 Nobel laureate. Seferis’s verses beautifully capture the ecstatic elation brought on by experiencing the natural world. Yet, true to the complexities of human emotion, the poem abruptly closes with a biting, melancholic lament:
“I don’t understand people: / no matter how much they play with colours / they all remain pitch-black.”
Marden’s paintings thrive inside this exact tension. While her soaring, saturated palettes radiate natural euphoria, the chaotic drips, heavy binding resins, and raw textures ground the work in a deeper, more turbulent emotional reality.
Look even closer at the glossy surfaces of her large-scale canvases, and you will notice ordinary fragments of the physical world trapped under the resin: seashells, shards of sea glass, and stray feathers. Marden relies on these items not merely as texture, but as artifacts of daily existence and talismans of flight, beauty, and protection.
This assemblage technique links her to a rich lineage of art history. On one hand, it directly evokes the avant-garde dialogue of Robert Rauschenberg’s pioneering “Combines,” which shattered the boundary between painting and sculpture by incorporating everyday found objects into the work. On the other hand, the choice represents a tender, deeply personal modern legacy. The patterns of seashells were a foundational inspiration for her late husband, the legendary minimalist painter Brice Marden, when he was creating his famous calligraphic “Shell Studies”.
While her resin-drenched triptychs demand the raw space of a floor to come alive, a parallel narrative unfolds through a collection of intimate watercolors. Painting while traveling allows Marden to soak in a vast range of global cultures, drawing heavily from recent time spent in Greece, India, and Morocco.
In these works on paper, the frantic energy of her New York studio settles into rhythmic fluidity. Instead of heavy pours, we see varied brushstrokes filling the page, merging and diverging in directional streams and interwoven tendrils of bright hue. It is a highly portable contrast to her studio practice: where the resin works are heavy, monumental, and bound to the floor, the watercolors are light, spontaneous, and born of movement.
Photo: Helen Marden, Spring, 2025, Resin, shells, and glass on linen, in 3 parts, overall: 50 × 150 inches (127 × 381 cm), © Helen Marden/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Maris Hutchinson, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Info: Gagosian, 541 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 14/7-21/8/2026, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/
