Broodthaers Society of America
Marley Freeman, Speechless
November 4 - December 23
Fridays thru Sundays 12 - 6:00pm
or by appointment

MBnb
520 West 143rd Street no. 2
1/A/B/C/D to 145th Street

Janice Guy and MBnb are pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by New York-based artist Marley Freeman. Born in Boston, Freeman is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Freeman's paintings are small, lush, layered, and abstract. She works deliberately but intuitively with thinned out, saturated colors that barely stay within the bounds of her brush. While other jewel-like painters such as Howard Hodgkin, Juan Uslé, or Elizabeth Peyton make their works in one sitting, Freeman often reworks her liquid layers until they become opaque objects, like a pent up peony flower or a stucco wall.

Just as memories collide and overlap, and events from years ago weave themselves into the present, Freeman’s paintings are an accumulation of layers with varying degrees of opacity and luster. There is a punk-fashion impulse and a sexuality of intuition, a calm elation. The paintings lick and spit, defined by a desire for languages that are located within the body.

Her paintings sometimes evoke an air of photography, the paint becoming so liquid and the colors so chemical as to seem the result of darkroom processes.

At bottom, Freeman's paintings record time: thinking time, making time, remembering time, drying time.

In addition to being a painter, Freeman has a day job as a preparator at MoMA P.S. 1. The job suits her because when she's working, she's working: long days and intensive weeks of careful attention to someone else's art—most recently Bruce Nauman's. After the installation is finished and the show opens, Freeman can retire to her own studio and spend the same if not more time with her own work.

For more information contact
Janice Guy | mail@janiceguy.com | +1 917 293 3507

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MBnb is an ongoing artwork in honor of the great Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers. It was conceived, in part, to explore what it might mean "to sell something and succeed in life” in what is euphemistically referred to as a sharing economy, fifty years after Broodthaers uttered those famously doomed, aspirational words.