megan marrin corps - david lewis · 2017-12-08 · megan marrin’s solo show corps, which features...

Megan MarrinCorps

June 28 - August 20, 2017

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Megan MarrinDavid Lewis

October 2017

Original article: https://artreview.com/magazine/2017-2006/artreview_october_2017_issue/

Megan Marrin CorpsDavid Lewis 28 June - 20 August

Each of the seven monumental paintings here feature the same species of giant potted flower - a leviathan with large petals of deep Bordeaux purple that enfold a sinewy, sky-scraping stalk. Pictured in various stages of blooming and dying, they look like something Louise Bourgeois would have made in bronze - bodily and macabre. While Megan Marrin has had a handful of two-person shows over the past five years, this marks her first solo exhibition and something of a departure in subject matter from her previous work. For Corps, the artist has painted seven iterations of the titan arum, a plant better known as the corpse flower, so called for the smell of rotting carcass it releases upon blooming. This bloom lasts 24 to 36 hours and, in cultivation,takes ten years to produce. I’d somehow missed last summer’s furoreover the New York Botanical Garden’s blooming corpse flower and I saw this show twice without knowing exactly what I was looking at. Subsequent research revealed

that much spectacles is made of this plant. According to Wikipedia, it hails from the equatorial rainforests of Sumatra and is firm-ly part of the colonial tradition of exhibiting foreign things for Westerners to be repulsed and intrigue by. Indeed, the flowering of these jungle plants has become an event guaran-teed to provoke and exoticising hubbub that draws crowds to botanical gardens across the US and Europe. In a way, Marrin’s paintings are an exten-tion of this phenomenon, as they are each copies of images of the plant found online - a cursory search turns up a handful of the pho-tographs she’s chosen, all of which show the plant in the greenhouses, or in captivity, so to speak. Some of the paintings include posing or gawking human figures, a feature that seems to emphasise the schoolboy joke of the plant’s name in Ancient Greek: Amorpho-phallus titanum, or ‘giant misshapen phallus’. The strongest paintings are the ones that show the flowers on their own. perhaps be-cause they seem more sincere. There is no

distraction from the care she has taken with lush pools of pastel pink, green and burgun-dy to form the fleshy body of the plant. While the composition of the painting is predeter-mined by its source material, the size feels purposeful. The 2.4m-tall canvases are about the size of the actual flower, and they’re hung almost touching the ground, reinforcing a bodily encounter between plant and viewer. The botanical gardens that house titan arums often christen them with women’s names, eg Trudy, Alice, Morticia - but Mar-rin’s titles are more libidinous. She has called them The Breed (2016), The Hunger (2016), The Invitation (2017). Marrin’s covetous titles don’t simply point to our desire to know the alien. In their references to coporeal craving. they ephasise that a specifically bodily desire (rather than neutral system-making) fuelled the Enghlightenment era’s obsessive cataloguing - in greenhouses and otherwise. While I’m not sure these paintings totally transend out cultural impulse to fetishise otherness, they certainly point it out to us. - Ashton Cooper

The Invitation, 2017, oil on canvas on Styrofoam, 244 x 183 cm.Photo: Max Yawney. Courtesy the artist and David Lewis, New York


Painting the Pageantry of the Corpse Flower:Megan Marrin’s paintings at David Lewis gallery show the remarkable plant in different stages of its life cycle.by Claire VoonAugust 16, 2017

Was there ever, in modern times, a species of flower more monitored and visited than the Amorphophallus titanum? Better known by its more sinister-sounding name, the corpse flower, this smelly plant requires between seven and ten years of care before it blossoms and unleashes its awesome scent of rotting meat. Its bloom is our spectacle, last-ing only about a day but spurring a public frenzy every time. When the New York Botanical Garden’s corpse flower was set to unfurl in July 2016, the organization set up at 24-hour live cam so that anyone could track it online. Ditto for a corpse flower in Washington, DC, and for the one at Indiana University. It was the summer of the Amorph-ophallus titanum, which captured hearts and noses around the world. And it’s happening again, with one corpse flower set to bloom this week in Chicago and three in the nation’s capital.

Megan Marrin, “The Legacy (STL)” (2017) (all photos by Max Yawney and courtesy David Lewis, unless otherwise noted)


At David Lewis gallery, the flower is blossoming, too, but with no trace of its famous scent. Currently on view is Megan Marrin’s solo show Corps, which features seven paintings of the flower in different stages of its life cycle, from peeling to peaking and, finally, to death. Large-scale, hyperrealistic, and rendered in smooth oil paint, the works immortalize the flower through an entrancing and evocative narrative.

Marrin began the series in January 2016, months before New York City’s corpse flower bloomed. The paintings are based on photographs she found online of differ-ent specimens on display at botanical gardens across the country. They’re stunning for Marrin’s careful and evidently laborious brushwork, but also because they freeze, on a grand scale, a rare phenomenon that allows us to witness life at its climax, followed by death, within such a short span of time. I didn’t grieve when I saw the real corpse flower at the end of its cycle (instead, I Insta-grammed it), but when confronted with Marrin’s larger-than-life series, I felt a tinge of sorrow for a living thing that works for a decade to blossom, only to collapse after a day.

Megan Marrin, “The Hunger” (2016)

Megan Marrin, “The Breed” (2016)


That’s not to say that Corps is entirely sobering. The series also cheekily reveals how we fetishize the corpse flower through our odd, thoroughly documented interactions. The plant is a sexy star in “The Keep,” in which a woman holds up a yardstick to measure its spadix, while smiling and posing for a picture; I’ve seen many iterations of this scene in videos posted by botanical gardens on YouTube. In “The Appointment,” someone has dramatically cor-doned off the flower on all sides, making it resemble a strange captive or the victim at a murder scene. In that work the crumpled flower — with its spadix folded over like the head of a Japanese paper crane and a curled spathe like its plume — is also surrounded comically by a medley of other, less exotic plants, which seem to watch over it.

Megan Marrin, “The Keep” (2016)

Beyond her choice of source imagery, Marrin’s playfulness also comes through in the titles of her works, which could double as the names of pulp paperbacks. Their vagueness — “The Invitation,” “The Hunger” — makes them sound more like cheesy, over-the-top brandings than serious descriptions, like tongue-in-cheek characterizations of the arranged pageantries.

The punch line of a corpse flower’s existence, of course, is that it stinks when it’s at its most appreciated part of its life. Marrin portrays this paradox perfectly in “The Sacrifice,” a funny painting in which a woman contorts her face as she steps up to the flower’s spathe to get a huge whiff. The perspective of this piece almost puts us inside the plant’s velvety cup, viewing the world beyond its folds. It’s an unexpected position, especially since the other six paintings feature the flower head-on and from a cautious distance, but I’m fond of the inclusion: it captures Amorphophallus titanum in all its essence, without any pomp — as a vast, magnificent, and quietly mighty creature, in appearance and aroma.


Megan Marrin, “The Sacrifice” (2016)

Megan Marrin, “The Appointment” (2017)

Megan Marrin, “The Invitation” (2016)

Installation view of Megan Marrin: Corps at David Lewis (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Megan Marrin: Corps continues at David Lewis (88 Eldridge Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through August 20.

Original article: https://hyperallergic.com/394596/megan-marrin-david-lewis-corpse-flower/


9 Artists to Watch in Augustby Robert GrandAugust 8, 2017

Original article: http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/artist_to_watch/9-artist-to-watch-in-august-54934

Megan Marrin’s solo show at David Lewis is her first ever, following a string of successful collaborative endeavors at Svetlana (New York), Dold Projects (Germany), and Wields Contemporary Art Center (Belgium). For this show, Marrin takes the ever-elusive “Corpse Flower” as her point of departure—the plant that’s known for smelling like a rotting carcass during its brisk bloom. Painting hyperrealistic depictions from photos taken around the country, Marrin’s works are remarkable not only in detail but in scale. Standing eight feet tall and flush with the wall, these paintings give you the feeling that you’re in a garden and not a gallery—but, thankfully, minus the noxious smell.


Megan MarrinAugust, 2017

This painting by Megan Marrin, The Breed, gives us a still life of a corpse flower, complicating a tradition that has deep ties to the vanitas and memento mori urges. What happens when that tradition is inverted–when life, not death, marks putrefaction? What can we say when the corpse comes of age?

The Breed, like the other works in Marrin’s show, Corps, which is currently on view at David Lewis Gallery, res-onated with me. Perhaps it’s because they’re terrifically well-painted, or perhaps it’s because I’m a native of Los Angeles, which is home to its own corpse flower. But there is more to this show than technical facility and interesting content. On two different registers, I’d say that these works, like Jaimie Warren’s, are investigating much older traditions.

Corps at David Lewis is a spacious and balanced exhibi-tion of eight paintings of Amorphophallus titanium, a.k.a. The Corpse Flower. As the artist notes in her statement, “There were to be eight paintings, four life, four death, all the same size, all the same color palette, underneath all is cinnabar green, no painting happened over white canvas.” The corpse flower is the largest blooming flower in the world. It is quite rare, but there are a handful of examples grown in city gardens around the country. Saint Louis has one, as does the Huntington Library and Gardens in Pasadena. But what’s most notable about the corpse flower is not its size, but the strong, pungent odor that it emits, signaling insects to pollinate. The flower’s second most notable feature is its time to bloom, which can take a full decade.

Marrin’s eight works document the bloom of a corpse flower, and in doing so form a four-by-four pendant of life and death. Breed for instance, depicts the famous bloom in its decline. Its towering inflorescence, which in the nearby painting, The Hunger, stands purple and erect, is now collapsed and blanched of color. The handling of paint and Marrin’s technical virtuosity create a near pho-

Megan Marrin, “The Breed,” 2016. Courtesy of David Lewis Gallery

Megan Marrin, “The Breed,” 2016. Courtesy of David Lewis Gallery


torealistic depiction of this living, dying, stinking thing. And in that way, the works seem to harken to the still-life tradition, and especially its seventeenth-century Dutch roots.

Four hundred years ago the still-life became a space for the Dutch to enact their Calvinist ideologies while also creating paintings that were suitable to a middle-class market (which had no need for devotional imagery). Great still-life painters like Rachel Ruysch and Clara Peeters filled their works with objects both bursting with life and flirting with decay. For them, these hyper-realistic works served as morality tales—memento moris—that life, in all its glory, was a fleeting thing. I see these same urges pulsing through the works at Corps, only now the story is somewhat stranger, because this flower’s maturation implies a kind of death, so its greatest moment of alive-ness is also the one that reminds people most of their own decrepitude. Marrin seized on this paradox, and the results are fruitful. Is there not something inescabably fleeting about a flower that takes ten years to blossom, only to bloom for a day?

We could also say much of her painting these atop cinna-bar green, and not a typically white-primed canvas (you can see this, if you look closely). Green primer was once de rigueur for tempera painters, who utilized green and red’s status as complementary colors. When someone like Duccio underpainted his Madonnas with green it allowed their reddish flesh tones, once applied on top, to “pop,” or have more saturation. That Marrin would un-derpaint green for overwhelmingly green canvases would seem to have the opposite effect, a kind of tonal flattening, or at least play a part in their unique appearance. This I also find quite interesting.

Megan Marrin, Corps, David Lewis Gallery. Courtesy of David Lewis Gallery

Megan Marrin, “The Legacy (STL),” 2017. Courtesy of David Lewis Gallery

Original article: http://onthefloor.org/2017/08/megan-marrin-corps-david-lewis-gallery/


Megan Marrin at David Lewis, New YorkBy BLOUIN ARTINFO July 28, 2017

David Lewis is hosting an exhibition,titled “Corps”, by New York-based artist Megan Marrin at the gallery’s New York location.

The exhibition presents recent works by Megan Marrin (b. St. Louis, MO), known for her objects and sculptural paintings made of materials such as leather, fabric, glass, paper, and resin. The artist received her BFA from School of Visual Arts, New York and has exhibited internationally in many two-person and group exhibitions, including at Brussels’ WIELS Contemporary Art Center with Elif Erkan, at New York’s Svetlana with Nora Schultz, at Renwick Gallery, New York with Tyler Dobson, Berlin’s Galerie Max Hetzler, Office Baroque in Brussels; and galleries in New York including Mitchell Algus Gallery, Bortolami, Bureau, Foxy Production, Rivington Arms among others.

Megan Marrin conceived this current body of work in 2015, and started her first painting in the following January. Taking thin Styrofoam as the medium to work on, she created eight paintings on a background of cinnabar green, four painting representing life, and the other four death, all in the same size and same color palette. The paintings are time-based in what they depict and how they are conceived. Each painting took about two months to complete, and they were fortified with the content of podcasts, and later, movies, slowly gathering their significance.

The exhibition is on view through August 20, 2017 at David Lewis, 88 Eldridge Street, Fifth Floor, New York, NY 10002, United States.

Original article: http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/2396473/megan-marrin-at-david-lewis-new-york

Megan Marrin: Corps. exhibition view


Original article: https://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/megan-marrin-corps

Top Five New York Art Shows This WeekMegan Marrin, “Corps”July 24, 2017

The subject of Marrin’s botanical still lifes is familiar to most people through media coverage. It’s the titan arum, a.k.a. the corpse flower, so named for the cadaverlike stench it produces while blooming.

Photograph: Courtesy David Lewis Gallery

Megan MarrinDavid Lewis Megan MarrinDavid Lewis

Megan Marrinby Zack Hatfield

Megan Marrin, The Legacy (STL), 2017, oil on canvas on Styrofoam, 72 x 96”.

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 plays an unwitting foil to Megan Marrin’s latest show, “Corps,” a septet of Photore-alist paintings that take 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 cele-brated for a rancid fragrance often likened to that of a spoiled carcass.

This pageantry is transformed into sexual farce on Marrin’s large oil, canvas, and Styrofoam images, where peeling spathes resemble shy stripteases and spadices are 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. While deep mauves and a healthy chartreuse appear triumphantly in The Invitation, in The Legacy (STL) (both 2017), our subject is imbued with a sense of destined wilt—erupting from a bed of blackened petals, the deflated spathe, in seasick beige, resembles a chewed-up ballet slipper. Elsewhere, the occasional human figure is smoothed and faceted, as though run through a Prisma filter—ironic, since the allure of this painterly time-lapse resides in the toilsome attention paid to what is so often memorialized with an iPhone snapshot.

Original article: https://www.artforum.com/picks/id=69762


This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Condo (the Good Kind) Invades New Yorkby Michael Anthony FarleyJune 26, 2017

Original article: http://artfcity.com/2017/06/26/this-weeks-must-see-art-events-condo-the-good-kind-invades-new-york/

This week starts off and ends a little slowly, but Wednesday to Friday ought to be pretty great. Spend your hump-day checking out openings at Marianne Boesky Gallery and David Lewis, where a group show and a solo show by painter Megan Marrin, respectively, look to have a much-needed sense of humor. Thursday night Condo New York kicks-off, in which 16 local galleries have surrendered their spaces temporarily to galleries from London, Mexico City, Shanghai, LA, and beyond. The preview receptions for the multiple shows are (thankfully) on both Thursday and Friday nights, so you won’t have to go crazy trying to rush back and forth between Chelsea and the Lower East Side.

Megan Marrin: Corps

This spooky-titled show has been promoted exclusively with one image: Megan Marrin’s 8-foot-tall oil painting of the stinky “corpse flower” at the Botanical Gardens that New Yorkers were obsessed with last year. It’s a great paint-ing, so no matter what else is in Corps (maybe something Black Metal?) it should be worth checking out.


Original article: http://www.artnews.com/2017/06/26/9-art-events-to-attend-in-new-york-city-this-week-109/

9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Weekby Editors of ARTnewsJune 26, 2017

Opening: Megan Marrin at David Lewis

Having worked on collaborative projects with Tyler Dobson, Elif Erkan, and Nora Schultz, Megan Marrin will now have her first solo show in New York. For one of those past shows, Marrin and Dobson created paintings of their vacations together in Europe; for another, she and Erkan made ambiguous canvases that resembled worn-down pieces of cement walls. In both cases, Marrin turned her attention to the process of making artworks—what would it mean to make an image of one’s own ready-made image, and what happens when an artwork resembles the wall on which it’s shown? Information about this exhibition is sparse, but it’s teased with an intriguing painting: The Breed (2017), an image of the so-called corpse flower that bloomed last year in the New York Botanical Garden.

David Lewis, 88 Eldridge Street, 5th Floor, 6–8 p.m.

megan marrin corps - david lewis · 2017-12-08 · megan marrin’s solo show corps, which features...

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