Courtesy: the artist and Sanderson Contemporary, Auckland.

Sanderson present a new suite of paintings by contemporary abstract painter Loren Marks. Marks lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her artworks present ethereal and dreamlike scenes whereby figures emerge from the alchemic realms of paint.

Marks was the recipient of the Whitecliffe College of Art and Design top student award while completing her undergraduate degree. Since then, the artist had a successful solo exhibition Here and There at Sanderson in 2023 followed by exhibiting in Contemporary Figurative – a group show curated by Dr Julian McKinnon at Webbs, Pōneke Wellington, and Paint like a Girl at The Tuesday Club as part of the Auckland Arts Festival 2023.

Marks has an intuitive and meditative relationship with paint and describes the time spent in her Te Atatū studio as ‘ritualistic’. The artist discusses how her figures reveal themselves to her while she works the canvas. Rather than alluding to specific characters the forms appear ambiguous and free of a fixed identity.

‘Figures coagulate as fragments of sculpture or restless spirits, momentarily visible through a fracture in the veil. An ethereal hand reaches up from moss-green depths, while the features of a face become apparent in the absent space Marks carves from her paint’, says Maya Love in her exhibition essay for Here and There.

In the first stages of painting, Marks lays her canvas flat and, with motions reminiscent of Helen Frankenthaler’s “soak-stain” technique, she applies pools of thinned pigment to the surface. Colours bloom and mix into one another as they soak into the fibres of the canvas, bringing forth impressions of classical scenes and landscapes. From these abstracted planes, the artist adds and removes pigment allowing her figures to appear and dissolve into the turpentine washes of each layer.

Continuing the artist’s investigation into the relationship between the physicality of paint and the figurative form, this exhibition presents a series of paintings that are equivalently concerned with surface as they are with narrative. In Right about Something; when examined closely, pools of pearlescent pigment flow, carving out impressions of ancient valleys and streams. Stepping back, the scene shifts with the apparition of figures and form: two people, old friends or lovers, sit facing each other.

The artist states: “all paintings are about the self in some way. And I feel human forms represented in paint are universally alluring.” For this reason Marks’ paintings are endlessly captivating. They are both familiar and uncanny, pulling you in and revealing moments of lucidity.

Opening Event: Saturday 27 January, 11 – 1pm.

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