Marley Freeman

Parker Gallery is proud to present its second solo exhibition with Marley Freeman. The exhibition features recent paintings and a selection of antique textiles from the Paul Freeman Textile Archive. The textiles are displayed on freestanding cardboard armatures, referencing architectural monuments at an intimiate, human scale.

The recent paintings encompass elements of abstraction, figuration, portraiture and landscape painting all at once, without yielding to any restrictive genre. Freeman’s paintings are nebulous enigmas, frustratingly and rewardingly elusive of language.

Each canvas demonstrates a striking autonomy; individual paintings present their own, idiosyncratic principles and personalities as though they were created in separate and distinct moments in time. Yet upon closer examination we see a specific color percolate in one and return in another, suggesting they were worked on together and with others, making their individuality ever more triumphant.

Spur With Energy (2019) simultaneously suggests a bird’s eye view of snarled mid-city traffic, a circuit breaker, and a friendly robot. The power of free association is ripe in Marley’s paintings, but is merely the amuse-bouche of their potential and enduring allure. Consider also The Future Arrived Too Early (2019), depicting two seated figures in folding chairs on a speckled floor in front of a wall smattered with splotches of seafoam green. Dividing the zones of floor and wall are dozens of horizontal bands in brilliant color, abstracting our already tenuous notion of pictorial space.

Marley Freeman (b. 1981 in Boston, MA, lives and works in New York, NY). Select solo exhibitions include Park Closes at Midnight, Karma, NY (2019), Janice Guy presents Marley Freeman, MBnb Project Space, New York, NY (2018), Californienne, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2018), Never Give a Sword to a Man Who Can’t Dance, PSM, Berlin, Germany (2017) and Decision 2015 (I Change), Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, NY (2015). Select group exhibitions include Monday is a Day Between Sunday and Tuesday, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2017), What Ever Moves Between Us Also Moves the World in General, Murray Guy, New York, NY (2017), Onion by the Ocean, Underdonk, Brooklyn, NY (2017), MaMa Cubicle, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2015), Ceramic Club Cash & Carry, White Columns, New York, NY (2015) and Significant Ordinaries, California State University Art Museum, Long Beach, CA (2012).