Loren Marks

View works. Loren Marks
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Loren Marks (b.1991 Aotearoa, New Zealand) is an artist based between Naarm Melbourne and Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her artworks present ethereal and dreamlike scenes whereby figures emerge from the alchemic realms of paint.

 

Marks has an intuitive and meditative relationship with paint and describes the time spent in her Te Atatu 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. Under the power of Marks’ spell, paint is alchemical, oscillating between liquid and solid, transparent, and opaque, invoking figure and form.’ - Maya Love

 
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.
 

Marks was the recipient of the Whitecliffe College of Art and Design top student award and the recipient of the George Pearce first year arts scholarship (2008). Previous Exhibitions include: ‘Free Verse’, Sanderson Contemporary, Auckland (2024), ‘Contemporary Figurative' curated by Dr Julian McKinnon, Webbs, Wellington (2023); Paint Like a Girl, group exhibition, The Tuesday Club, Artweek, Auckland (2023); Across a Crowded Room, group exhibition, Broker Galleries, Queenstown (2023); 'Here and There', Sanderson Contemporary, Auckland, (2023); ‘In a Sense’, Daily Bread Ponsonby, Auckland (2022); Lucida, Newmarket, Auckland (2021); Small Works Art Show, Brunswick Street Gallery, Fitzroy, VIC, Australia (2021)

 

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