Her exhibition The Journey’s The Thing on the third floor of Sprüth Magers, London, is the first time her work has been exhibited in the city and outside of the US in ten years.

Lerner has created her own complex personal vocabulary with her approach to form and colour. These influences, amalgamated from different eras and cultures, contribute to her complex approach to surface, shape and hue.

The two tondos of Affiliated Characters (1990) evidence a similar effect – one with a hole in its center and the other with a circular segment not so much bitten out of it as carefully removed with a cookie cutter. The restrained concentric red and black of the left panel is in opposition of the feathery stripes of black within the other half, punctuated with its staccato-like cut-out and another semi-circular ‘D’ floating within.

As the American poet and critic John Yau has observed, this synesthetic connection between sound, colour and shape places her alongside figures like the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who in his 1871 sonnet “Voyelles” (“Vowels”) saw a connection between vowels and certain colours.²

An earlier work in the exhibition, from over thirty years prior, Red and Black (1992) possess a palate that is markedly more restrained than Sixteen Improvisations but with a surface that is no less complicated. The overall form of the panel can be considered simultaneously as shield-like, like a ship’s bow in profile, or as a semi-circle with a small oblong addition to where the round has been sliced in two.

Sitting within this is a borderless circular nucleus, touching the top and bottom edges of the painting, comprised of both regular triangles and those that have had a segment removed or edge that has become subtly curved. The red and yellow hover on the black surface whilst also seemingly engrained within, as if punctured through.

Marilyn Lerner (*1942, Milwaukee) lives and works in New York. She received her BS from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and her MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She has held numerous solo exhibitions at galleries and institutions including Kate Werble Gallery, New York (2023, 2021, 2018); CUE Art Foundation, New York (2016); Butler Gallery, Kilkenny Castle, Kilkenny, Ireland (2014); Robert Morrison Gallery, New York (1992); John Good Gallery, New York (1989, 1987); Kornblee Gallery, New York (1976); and Zabriskie Gallery, New York (1969). Her work has been exhibited in group shows at venues including the Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey; the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Staten Island; Madison Art Center, Madison; PS1, New York; the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

Sources cited:
1. Marilyn Lerner interviewed by Lilly Wei in ‘The Peripatetic Artist: 14 Statements’, Art in America, July 1989.
2. John Yau, ‘A Singular Enterprise’, Hyperallergic, September 11, 2016.