Helen Marden

Gagosian is pleased to announce Agape/Αγάπη, an exhibition of paintings by Helen Marden opening on September 21, 2023. Marden’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in Athens, it features early works painted in her studio in Hydra, Greece, alongside a new series of paintings that reaffirms her commitment to bold gesture and color.

To make her new paintings, Marden begins by applying a liquid resin to the canvas. As the medium hardens, she adds powdered pigments, working with improvisational immediacy to paint with pure, saturated hues. Defying the lingering conception that color is a frivolous or secondary concern for artists—women artists in particular—Marden’s daring palette is central to her work. Her vivid compositions are linked by flowing skeins, their sinuous overlapping shapes defined by both clear contours and delicately feathered edges. Incorporated within the surface of selected paintings are objects such as feathers, shells, twigs, and pieces of sea glass—elements from nature that are fragile and tough, vital and transformative.

Marden’s paintings are informed by her engagement with contemporary abstraction, her immersion in nature, and her fascination with Greek and other cultural traditions. Since 1971, she has maintained a home on the Aegean island of Hydra, and it was here that she resumed painting in earnest following a hiatus in her art making, making a body of work represented in Agape/Αγάπη by two paintings from 1980. These early works reveal a transformation in her approach, from an abstraction of the rugged and pastoral nature of the Grecian landscape to a distillation of its topography into biomorphic shapes.