Marley Freeman: no when
Karma Gallery, New York
Through July 18, 2025
no when presents a selection of intuitively generated and yet tightly composed paintings by Marley Freeman made in the past two years. The artist found her way to painting through a deep knowledge of pattern, texture, and color cultivated during early experiences with mosaic and textile production—the latter at her family business and then an archive connected to a jacquard and dobby mill. Building on the resulting knowledge that flat media have their own architectures, Freeman’s recent oil and acrylic paintings are at once process-based and concerned with the structural qualities of two-dimensionality. These works are driven by her investigation into, as the artist puts it, “how abstractions can act like images.”
Working simultaneously across an array of sizes in her studios in New York and Sheffield, Massachusetts, she moves fluidly from canvas to canvas. The viewer’s movements through the gallery spaces of no when echo this dance: intimate, jewel-like canvases pull us in close, while larger, sweeping compositions reward another kind of embodied looking. 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.
Despite her hand’s evidence in each composition, Marley 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 color 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 Marley 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 sublimely unempathetic (2025) 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, Marley 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, nocturnal encounter with a lunatic, and dead century in the trench (all 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, Marley Freeman paints her way through and arrives on the other side, creating one continuous fabric of entwined colors, forms, and references. Unlike textiles, however, her paintings are liberated from the constraints of functionality. Here, she finds the freedom to improvise.
KARMA
549 West 26th Street, New York City
Marley Freeman: no when
Karma Gallery, New York City, May 29 – July 18, 2025