Marilyn Henrion Exhibition

NohoM55 Gallery

This event has ended.

“The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” TS Eliot, Four Quartets
To celebrate the history of her hometown, the artist chose to title this series of works Mannahatta, the original Native American name for Manhattan Island and also the title of a well-known poem by Walt Whitman.

In his essay for the catalog, Ulysses Grant Dietz, Chief Curator Emeritus of the Newark Art Museum and great great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, writes,
“Although written to evoke an entirely different city, Whitman’s words still evoke Manhattan as Marilyn Henrion sees it, the “urban geometry” of her native city, the “co-existence of past and present” on the streets up and down and across the breadth of this sixteen-mile-long granite island. She has taken her photographic images—visual lines of poetry in her personal paean to the city she loves—and disrupted them with overlapping concentric circles that she stitches by hand, both softening the slick surface of the image and creating a gently dreamlike ripple effect as of raindrops on still water. This is a private vision of the City That Never Sleeps. Henrion shares it with us, but we are not in it except through our own effort in looking. This is about the texture and vitality of a place that shapes the lives of everyone who ventures to live here, for good or for ill. For Marilyn Henrion, it has been for good; but it is not forever. In the artist’s own words: “We are here for a while and then gone, while the structures remain.””

The artist writes….”As a life-long New Yorker, my aesthetic vision has always been deeply rooted in the urban geometry of my surroundings, from the earlier geometric abstractions to the more recent mixed media works. I am particularly interested in the co-existence of past and present, especially in architecture and other man-made structures. Throughout the ages, the presence of the human hand upon the landscape has always expressed our eternal yearning for immortality, evidence that says “I was once here”. Much as Edward Hopper did in the 20th century, I synthesize and transform the “facts” of the material world to reflect my experience of a particular place. The quilting design that animates the surface, variations of overlapping concentric circles, is symbolic of the ephemeral nature of our existence on the landscape. Whether focusing on historic landmarks with new eyes, or construction sites that testify to the vibrant ever-evolving cityscape, my objective is to illuminate beauty in unexpected places…a subway entrance, a doorway, a fire escape, a rooftop.”

The Process: The artist’s images are derived from her digitally manipulated photographs which are printed on cotton, hand-quilted, and gallery-wrapped on stretched canvas.

Marilyn Henrion is represented in the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art and her works are included in museum, corporate and private collections internationally.