HELEN MARDEN

Marden paints with acrylic, resin, and powdered pigment, working on canvas panels placed on the studio floor or exterior ground. She applies vivid hues with dynamic gestures in glossy, translucent pours and looping, gestural strands across multiple white panels. She paints other works on smaller round canvases, producing dense compositions with intensely saturated concentrations of color. Her expressive abstractions are driven by the joy of life. “I feel strongest when I’m in my studio,” she explains.

The exhibition in New York is titled after the poem “Interlude of Joy” by George Seferis, a Greek poet and the 1963 Nobel laureate in Literature. Its verses communicate the elation prompted by experiences of nature, while ending with the lament “I don’t understand people: / no matter how much they play with colours / they all remain pitch-black.”

Marden also incorporates natural objects—shells, sea glass, feathers—into many of her paintings. Emblems of beauty, protection, and flight, they are also artifacts of everyday life. These applied elements also evoke the practices of artists who are important to her, such as Robert Rauschenberg’s inclusion of found objects into his work and the inspiration that her husband, Brice, found in the patterns of seashells when creating his calligraphic Shell Studies.

Marden is motivated by both nature and culture. Watercolor allows her to paint while traveling, and reflects the breadth of her influences, including recent time spent in Greece, India, and Morocco. Varied brushstrokes fill these works, merging and diverging in directional streams and interwoven tendrils of bright hues.

In 2025 Gagosian published Marden’s first-ever monograph, covering over forty years of her work, including paintings exhibited for the first time in Interlude of Joy. The book features an essay by Anna Godbersen and a conversation between the artist and Kiki Smith.