Megan Marrin
If the art world had to be reduced to a single smell, the pungent fumes of freshly slathered white paint would make a strong candidate. Its redolence played an unwitting foil to “Corps,” Megan Marrin's 2017 solo show at David Lewis Gallery, a septet of Photorealist paintings that took as their muse the Amorphophallus titanum, or corpse flower. Thousands of people descend upon botanical gardens to bask in the flower’s languid bloom—which occurs every seven to ten years—that is celebrated for a rancid fragrance often likened to that of a spoiled carcass. This pageantry was transformed into sexual farce on Marrin’s large oil, canvas, and Styrofoam images, where peeling spathes resembled shy stripteases and spadices were tape-measured or cordoned off like talent on a porn set. Given B-movie titles such as The Breed and The Hunger (both 2016), their debt to the floral abstractions of O’Keeffe originates not in reductive Freudian readings, but in how both artists approach an individual subject from various perspectives in order to glean its essence.
Marrin's work has consistently and obliquely played on the body and sexuality. Untitled (Barr-Co) (2013), which showed at Foxy Productions, was made with photos and plastic forms from the Garment …
If the art world had to be reduced to a single smell, the pungent fumes of freshly slathered white paint would make a strong candidate. Its redolence played an unwitting foil to “Corps,” Megan Marrin's 2017 solo show at David Lewis Gallery, a septet of Photorealist paintings that took as their muse the Amorphophallus titanum, or corpse flower. Thousands of people descend upon botanical gardens to bask in the flower’s languid bloom—which occurs every seven to ten years—that is celebrated for a rancid fragrance often likened to that of a spoiled carcass. This pageantry was transformed into sexual farce on Marrin’s large oil, canvas, and Styrofoam images, where peeling spathes resembled shy stripteases and spadices were tape-measured or cordoned off like talent on a porn set. Given B-movie titles such as The Breed and The Hunger (both 2016), their debt to the floral abstractions of O’Keeffe originates not in reductive Freudian readings, but in how both artists approach an individual subject from various perspectives in order to glean its essence.
Marrin's work has consistently and obliquely played on the body and sexuality. Untitled (Barr-Co) (2013), which showed at Foxy Productions, was made with photos and plastic forms from the Garment District: it’s two closeups of a burning candle seen through a clear but headless male. Earlier works drew attention to physicality by swapping out by playing off viewer expectations: Untitled (303 Shutter) for instsance, was a realistic sculpture of a wooden shutter made entirely of leather. Born 1982 in St. Louis, MO, Marrin currently lives and works in New York. Since receiving her BFA from New York's School of Visual Arts in 2004, she has exhibited internationally in two-person and group exhibitions at WIELS Contemporary Art Center in Brussels, Svetlana gallery in New York, NY and Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin, among others.
Text courtesy of Zack Hatfield and Will Heinrich
David Lewis, New York, NY
