MARLEY FREEMAN

Working simultaneously across an array of sizes in her studios in New York and Sheffield, Massachusetts, she moves fluidly from canvas to canvas. Each work is both question and answer; she resolves her initial marks in a process of painterly call and response that takes place over the course of months. Augmented with passes of transparent, thinned-out oil, early layers of acrylic are nonetheless visible on the surface, like the warp threads that undergird every woven textile. The triptych only his desire kept him from fleeing (2025)—the largest painting Freeman has ever made—expands her brushstrokes and organic forms across a vast, eighteen-foot-wide plane, her gestures reaching and undulating from one panel to the next. Created in the wide-open environment of western Massachusetts, only his desire evinces a new willingness in Freeman’s work to submerge the viewer in colour, inciting a more phenomenological relationship between body and canvas.

Despite her hand’s evidence in each composition, Freeman’s paintings are not purely expressive. She also conceives of them as images, built up from an initial mark into whole visual systems. Though every stroke in give this sea a name (2024) is brushy, the transparency of Freeman’s oil allows them to intermingle, each colour reacting to what is beside and beneath it. Hot pinks and turquoises distributed all over the surface are set off by ochres as the varied marks coalesce. Like Chicago Imagist Barbara Rossi, with whom Freeman studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the younger artist allows visual stimuli of all kinds to seep into her paintings, rendering them resolutely non-hierarchical. The lyrical forms of no suffering is unnecessary (2024) evoke the Imagist’s tradition of off-kilter representation, but Freeman layers them into an abstract composition that verges on pattern while never actually repeating itself. Alongside textiles and twentieth-century painters, she looks to the old masters—Giotto, for the way his pastel tones set off his famous blue at Padua; El Greco, for his ability to create a mood through hue—in her conception of palette as a wordless conduit for the expression of emotional states.

For years, Freeman has collaborated with friends such as Lukas Geronimas and Jared Buckhiester, relating to one another through making together. Freeman’s paintings shell crater with flowers and _nocturnal encounter with a lunati_c (both 2025) are ringed with ceramics created by Buckhiester and framed in metal forms hewn by Geronimas. Her titles, borrowed from artists and writers like Otto Dix, Bernadette Mayer, Agnes Martin, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Susan Howe (the show is titled after a line from one of her poems), also evince the importance of engaging with the creations of others. ‘The only way to work through ideas,’ she says, ‘is to paint through them.’ Conspiring with other artists and with material and image histories alike, Freeman paints her way through and arrives on the other side, creating one continuous fabric of entwined colours, forms, and references. Unlike textiles, however, her paintings are liberated from the constraints of functionality. Here, she finds the freedom to improvise.