Image © Holly Burgess for Homestyle
Exhibitions
2021 Lucida 262 Broadway, Newmarket, Auckland, New Zealand
2022 Small Works Show, Brunswick Street Gallery Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia
2022 In a Sense Daily Bread, 108 Ponsonby Road, Auckland, New Zealand
2023 Here and There Sanderson Contemporary Gallery, Osborne Lane, 2 Kent Street, Newmarket, Auckland, New Zealand
2023 Contemporary Figurative, Webbs, 23 Marion Street, Te Aro, Wellington, New Zealand
2023 Across a Crowded Room, group exhibition, Broker Galleries, Queenstown (online)
2023 Paint Like a Girl group exhibition, The Tuesday Club as part of Artweek.
2024 Free Verse, Sanderson Contemporary Gallery, Osborne Lane, 2 Kent Street, Newmarket, Auckland, New Zealand
Marks is represented by Sanderson Gallery and 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, Poneke 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 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.’[1]
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.[2] 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 equivalent- ly 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.”[3] For this reason Marks’ paintings are endlessly captivating. They are both familiar and uncanny, pulling you in and revealing moments of lucidity.
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[1] Love, Maya. ‘Here and There – Loren Marks Exhibition Essay’, Sanderson Contemporary, 14th Feb – 12th Mar 2023.
[2] Marder, Lisa. “The Soak-Stain Painting Technique of Helen Frankenthaler.” ThoughtCo. https://www. thoughtco.com/painting-technique-of-helen-frankenthaler-4118620 (accessed January 10, 2024)[3] Lines, Alice. ‘Magic Eye – An interview with Loren Marks’, HomeStyle Magazine, 2023-24 Summer Issue.
https://artnow.nz/exhibitions/free-verse
A trip to artist Loren Marks’ Te Atatū, Auckland studio
https://artnow.nz/news/sanderson-contemporary-loren-marks
Loren Marks speaks to us about her mesmerising abstract works in her new exhibition ‘Here and There’
Essay
By Maya Love
Commissioned by Sanderson Contemporary Galley
Feb, 2023
Loren Marks could be a modern-day oracle. At Delphi, the high priestess Pythia burned laurel leaves and barley meal, inhaling their vapours to enter a trance so she could utter the words of Apollo. Amidst the fumes of oil paint, Marks takes up Pythia’s mantle in a studio nestled into the industrial backlot of Te Atatu Peninsula. Marks makes paintings in continual flux, alive with the hum of her expressive application and electric colour, offering visions of form.
After graduating from Whitecliffe with a Bachelor of Fine Arts nearly ten years ago, Marks’ practice fell to the wayside while she forged a career in fashion as a print designer. On a trip through Greece and Italy, Marks recalls being enchanted by frescos and archaeological sites like Ercolano and Delos. Inspiration kindled during her travels caught alight during the lockdowns of 2020 when painting offered an escape from the constraints of everyday life. It has remained with Marks as a meditative practice ever since.
Marks enters a subconscious middle world to begin painting. In this liminal state, she is excited by the loss of control and allows the paint to manifest her ideas, emerging and receding in the painted space. Although she hesitates to describe her process as deliberately spiritual, Marks acknowledges this resonance.
Atop a watery acrylic base, she builds swathes of oil paint. Marks uses brushes soaked in turpentine to erode the colour, as an archaeologist sweeps dirt from ancient pottery. In the lower third of Closed Eyes, she excavates colour and texture with dry brushing, revealing its sedimentary architecture and drawing the warp and weft of the canvas to its surface.
Figures coagulate as fragments of sculpture or restless spirits, momentarily visible through a fracture in a veil. An ethereal hand reaches up from moss-green depths in Eyes for You, 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.
As a child, Marks recalls playing with her coloured felt tips as if they were dolls, each speaking to her in a unique voice. In Things I Wish I Knew, magenta and plum still tussle for authority over the caustic hum of lilac. In Ever Before, acidic yellows spill forth like ectoplasm from three figures that survey the viewer. Marks can still hear her colour’s chatter, though their conversations are more nuanced now.
Marks notes contrasting intentions when comparing her job as a designer and her practice as an artist. Her designs are always about the outcome and intended for someone else’s purposes. Her paintings are primarily for her, and the process of creation is as crucial as their outcome; which often contrasts with Marks’ initial expectations of a painting.
As Circe, the witch of Aiaia, remarks in Madeline Miller’s reimagining of the myth, painting “was a little like spell-work…for your hands must be busy, and your mind sharp and free.” Marks’ intentions are manifest in her explorative, expressive practice. Still, she is attentive to her materials’ voices, allowing her to conjure shades or memories and conduct them in a symphony of gesture and form.