Helen Marden

It’s not forced, I love painting. I hope I live to be one hundred and I paint until then.
—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.

Marden was born in 1941 in Pittsburgh and lives and works in New York City; Tivoli, New York; Marrakech, Morocco; and the island of Nevis in the West Indies, where she runs the boutique resort Golden Rock (also the name of her active Instagram account), which she established with her late husband, Brice Marden (1938–2023).

She graduated with a BFA in art from Pennsylvania State University in 1963, and then, inspired by Paul Bowles’s translations of storytellers such as Mohamed Mrabet of Tangier, traveled to Europe and Morocco before relocating to New York City. It was in New York that she became interested in the spontaneity and immediacy of the work of artists associated with Tachisme such as Henri Michaux, Jean Fautrier, and Wols (A. O. Wolfgang Schulze), as well as in the Abstract Expressionists.

In the early 1980s—with the encouragement of other artists such as Jennifer Bartlett, Elizabeth Murray, and Kiki Smith—Marden undertook painting in earnest, maintaining studios in New York and Hydra, Greece. She took part in group exhibitions including Who Chooses Who at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1994); Selections Summer ’96 at the Drawing Center, New York (1996); and Couples Discourse (2006) and Uncanny Congruences (2013) at the Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, University Park. She also participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York (1995) and The Last Brucennial, Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York (2014), and her work is represented in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.