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The world is a network of connected beings and
experiences, and Marina Reiter’s paintings offer to
make sense of the patterns, impasses and opportunities
we pull from our past and cast into the future. In her
crowded, expertly choreographed abstractions, globular
forms move into and out of one another’s orbit, marking
brief encounters in some places and becoming completely
intertwined elsewhere. These trajectories are informed
by Reiter’s own experiences, growing up between her
hometown of Moscow, New York City and Beijing, and
now finally settled in Washington D.C. This life trajectory of
moves and readjustments every few years has left Reiter
especially attuned to the hardships and strengths of lives
started, packed up and restarted elsewhere.
Indeed, her colorful, immersive paintings speak to
contemporary experiences of a world in which people
are more connected than ever, and simultaneously more
vulnerable to feelings of alienation than at any preceding
epoch. Her gentle, curvilinear shapes evoke human forms,
atomic particles and the very make-up of social fabric. Each
is carefully shaded and rendered with soft, meticulous brush
strokes, evoking strong impressions of depth, lighting and
texture. And yet Reiter resists anthropomorphizing these
forms, instead casting them into a surreal void, spinning,
floating, colliding and bouncing amidst small black lines
and shapes, each painting unfolding against soft, blurred
backdrops.
The sense of movement and activity, in fact, may be the most
striking effect of Reiter’s work. Unlike Joan Miró’s surrealism
or Fernand Léger and Piet Mondrian’s abstractions, Reiter
depicts a realm of infinite possibility. She strives to create
space for movement, ambition and optimism where others
prize static, perfectly balanced compositions. Relations
between each of her forms and their surroundings are never
at a standstill, but in a constant process of renegotiation and
redefinition. Remarkably, though, her paintings don’t seem
off-kilter or unfinished. Instead, Reiter manages to capture
moments of movement, change and tension that are also
carefully poised and composed. These elemental scenes
depict our world, one that continuously tries to picture itself
while it keeps changing.
Websites: www.marinareiter.com
www.Art-Mine.com/ArtistPage/Marina_Reiter.aspx
MARINA REITER
Beyond Perception Oil on Canvas 24” x 18” So Deep and Tempting is the Dream Oil on Canvas 40” x 30”
71 ArtisSpectrum