Margaux Ogden

Fascinated by the slippage between accidental and planned mark-making, Margaux Ogden’s abstract paintings appear as a tangle of lines, forms, and color fields. Her fluid free-form gestures meld with more precise geometric shapes to create a new visual vocabulary that feels at once foreign and familiar. This sensation is further accentuated by Ogden’s use of color. Inspired by the Minimalist embrace of the monochrome, many of Ogden’s paintings appear as studies into a single color, produced in various degrees of saturation and dilution across her raw, unprimed canvas. Drawn in particular to pastel yellows, pinks, greens, the joyful nature of these colors bely the layered and intense nature of the creation of the painting itself. Of her work, Ogden has said, “One could trace the compositions back to some modernist moment when geometry began to skid. ...the spatial and perspective shifts create a freefall effect, dissolving any system beyond which is contained in the frame.”