Current Show

The Gallery is pleased to present artists who especially lean into the language of mark making, where the surface of a work reveals the artist's hand. Mark Making: Dots, Lines, Textures is about the creative process. Those who linger over a piece will sense the artist's hand moving—picture them holding the brush, graphite, or palette knife. Viewers who focus on this will begin to understand how the artwork emerged.

Brushstrokes, lines, scratches, drips—these applications of marks are all here, serving as defining characteristics of each artist's style. One artist, self-described as petite, rotated a huge canvas on the wall, flipping it and painting vigorously. Their depiction of process conveyed the physicality of gestural brushwork and the feelings associated with expressive brushstrokes. Others spoke of the traces of line: shading a square with colored pencil as a meditative act, meaningful in and of itself. Thus repetitive, rhythmic, deliberate strokes coalesce into a drawing of significance and mystery. Another artist described achieving dimensionality through lines of varied thickness—all drawn with a single carpenter's pencil, sharpened with a knife, a detail shared as a point of pride.

These hallmarks of style tell us about the artists themselves, as does reading the textural surface and topography of a canvas. Impasto serves as a relief map on the surface; scratch marks and pentimenti become signifiers and traces. This kind of surface exploration deepens our understanding of the creative process. Noticing the touch and pressure embedded in each stroke, we come to better appreciate the physicality of paint and the record of the artist's hand at work.

Mark Making, an exhibition theme centered on artistic process, aims to make art more accessible and bring artists and their work into conversation. We are deeply grateful to our growing community of artists—for not only sharing their artwork with us, but for sharing themselves. Thank you for contributing to THE Gallery and art ecosystem that brings so much to so many.