A look at: Marion Fink

April 14, 2021
  • Marion Fink
    Marion Fink (photo by Michael Lüder)
    Marion Fink Joins C24 Gallery
    C24 Gallery is thrilled to announce that we are now representing artist Marion Fink. Based out of Potsdam and Berlin, Germany, Fink is known for her life-sized, colorful monotypes depicting young people in various states of connection and disconnection to the elements of the world around them.
  • Marion Fink is an explorer. Her layered works probe the spheres of consciousness we create for ourselves in our own private worlds, an investigation that is surely in step with the personally curated environments many of us inhabit in today’s virtual, online culture. As part of a generation that was raised in the digital age, she has experienced, firsthand, the paradox of seemingly limitless access to information along with increasingly fragmented, competing perspectives, exacerbated by the harsh scrutiny of social media. The resulting feelings of isolation and dissociation from genuine, physical interactions form the foundation for Fink’s surreal portraits of young people, each living in their own parallel reality.
  • The development of her creative process mirrors this investigation. Having launched her career with the relatively conventional medium of figurative oil painting, she naturally evolved to the more arduous, physical practice of large-scale monoprinting. Her early painted portraits embodied elements of expressionism, with a mosaic-like application of color to intimately posed figures in unromantic proximity to objects such as apples and fish. Characters often appear semi-nude, contorted or grappling with one another, open-mouthed or licking reflective surfaces. Her investigation of self was expressed through portrayals of the human body in relation to itself and other bodies.

    Within a short time, Fink’s work began to show signs of deconstruction, expressing a kind of malaise, as her figures became more isolated, floating in space or partially disintegrating. Her use of color changed — became less blended, more pixelated — perhaps an early reference to the digital world which would become more of an influence in her visual narrative. Soon, whole sections of bodies would be replicated, or missing altogether, and her figures began to lean back in glassy-eyed states of mindless repose that would become very common in later works. Her paintings continued to embrace the territory of existential dilemma as her figures became darker, more obscured, even taking on the appearance of photo negatives.
  • Marion Fink at work in her studio
    Marion Fink at work in her studio
  • She thoughtlessly transformed her environment, her environment thoughtfully transformed her, 2019 Monotype, oil color and wax, pastel on pape

    Marion Fink. She thoughtlessly transformed her environment, her environment thoughtfully transformed her, 2019

    Monotype, oil color and wax, pastel on paper

    60.24 x 60.24in. (153 x 153cm)

    Fink began her practice of monoprinting in 2016, embodying in technique the thematic explorations of her earlier work. The very physical process of applying individual layers of color via plexi-glass plates would require the weight of her entire body. This extreme physicalization of separately creating and directly interacting with the visual components of her portraits was an embodiment of the dissociative state reflected in so many of the figures she portrayed.

    To view Fink’s works in person is, in itself, a visceral experience. Her life-sized portraits take on an otherworldly significance in their surreal juxtaposition of everyday objects and tools with more abstract representations of universal forces and elements. We see, amidst the often disillusioned expressions of her young subjects, a physical connection to the building blocks of life that offers a key to transcending the dissociative nature of digital reality. The long, narrative titles of her creations remind us that our quirky, individual stories, the most obvious evidence of our subjectivity, may hold the key to our interconnectedness after all.