Introductions | Margaux Ogden (2024)
Introductions
Margaux Ogden
24 September – 7 November 2024
White Cube is pleased to present an online exhibition by painter Margaux Ogden. Iteratively conceived, Ogden’s abstract paintings use procedures of mirroring and doubling in their compositions. Folding and unfolding, repeating and diverging, the artist combines repetition with brilliant colour and biomorphic form to further the visionary ideas of meditative abstraction.
© Margaux Ogden. Photos © Charlie Rubin.
Harnessing a responsive method of painting, mimetic effects carry across Ogden’s practice through the interplay of ‘intentional and incidental mark making’. Variations in scale, viscosities of paint and pressures of the hand make painting an embodied performance for the artist – a means of finding presentness amidst the immediate action that drives her work’s production. Never re-painting or covering up a mark, heavily diluted acrylics in thinly veiled, gauzy layers ensure that the textural weave of the canvas, its ‘substrate’, remains fused into each image. ‘Through repetition, I’m allowed a great deal of freedom and decision-making while painting’ Ogden says. Executed in acrylic paint, Ogden relies on the brush alone for her intricate forms, dispensing with the aid of tape, rulers, underpainting or projection, and instead celebrating the imperfections that may result.
Margaux Ogden
Bathers (Primary Red, Quinacridone Red, Magenta & Blue), 2024
Ogden explores ideas of imbalance, repetition, and the simultaneity of flat and deep space in her hypnotic canvases. The ‘Bathers’ series of paintings (2021–ongoing) engage these spatial qualities through formal and thematic means, by drawing imagery from her time in Rome. Evolving from the drawings and watercolours she created while she was an Abbey Fellow at the British School at Rome, during Autumn of 2021, the ‘Bathers’ respond directly to the textural poetry of the capital, tracing its ruins, architecture and the graphic passage of light and shadow in her compositions.
In particular, Ogden drew inspiration from the intricate mosaics adorning the floor of the ancient Baths of Caracalla. At once figurative and abstract, the mosaics impart a lavishness and exuberance to the otherwise ruined building, making Caracalla one of Rome’s most beautiful and elaborate baths. Ogden uses the series to invoke the bodies that once moved through its space, visible in the endlessly recessive volumes of the paintings’ compositions and the ghostly figments that appear to haunt them.
Margaux Ogden
Bathers (Phthalo Green, Magenta, Cyan & Red), 2024
Price upon request
‘Every mark is intentional, but you can’t always control the paint.’
Alluding to mnemonic devices and the construction of memory, the ‘Bathers’ paintings follow a loose grid system and are organised around a centre line. As the artist has remarked, ‘I’m bifurcating the surface. One side mirrors the other, but not in a way that is supposed to be a copy or reflection, more like an echo.’ Functioning in a manner not dissimilar to a Barnett Newman ‘zip’ artwork, this vertical division of the canvas emphasises difference and diversion within the painting; a bridge uniting similar forms from each ‘half’ of the canvas.
Subtle shifts and tonal nuances within colour combinations build a ‘co-orbital dialogue’ – emergent connections that are unconsciously transferred from work to work. ‘When I am painting, it feels like repetition is necessary only to discover something new in the next painting, to push the next painting forward, or discover that next image’ she says. ‘Every mark is intentional, but you can’t always control the paint.’
Margaux Ogden
Bathers (Manganese Historical Blue, Magenta & Viridian), 2024
Margaux Ogden
Bathers (Green Gold, Indian Yellow Hue, Blue, Hot Pink & Lavender), 2024
Featuring sugary tones of pink, gold, orange and red in their palettes, the ‘Bathers’ make use of unmixed colour directly from the tube, which have been namechecked in artworks’ titles. Brandishing typically ‘feminine’ colours with verve, Ogden asserts that this is ‘a feminist choice… a way of pushing back against the historical male seriousness of abstraction.’ Furthering this, several repeated motifs in the paintings carry undeniable associations to the feminine, with its reference to the female body and the moon, at partial, eclipsed points in the lunar cycle.
Operating within a series of self-imposed systems and parameters, her paintings begin with the discovery of a simple shape or an object from which an exploration of structural and spatial logics issues forth. Pointing to the natural and the manmade world, hints of landscapes feature in the compositions: cave-like spaces, or trails of meandering ‘rivers’ that create edges in parts, or elsewhere bind areas together. There is strong intimation of entry points, doorways and portals residing in these paintings, which juxtapose zones of dimension-free, airy space. Reminiscent of the work of the ‘Desert Transcendentalists’ – such as that of the American symbolist painter Agnes Pelton (1881–1961) – Ogden’s work speaks to both an interest in accessing a spiritual sublime as well as an overlooked moment in female art history. As the artist says, the paintings result from ‘obsession, iterations, repetition, pattern in both human behaviour and nature, evolution, degradation, bastardization and the human touch’.
About the artist
© Margaux Ogden. Photo © Charlie Rubin.
Margaux Ogden (b. 1983) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In 2005 she received her BA from Bard College and in 2012 she received her MFA in Painting from Boston University. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Tif Sigfrids, Athens, Georgia (2024); Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2023); Rental Gallery, East Hampton, New York (2018) and Embajada, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2016), among others. In 2021 she was Abbey Fellow at the British School at Rome, and in 2018 she was a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Recipient.
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